an Hour without Tweet

I was on twitter then I saw this message :

Twitter will be down for 1 hour of planned maintenance at 10a PST on April 5.

it make me smile really. but a concept emerged in my mind again, when you are pretending to serve people in real time you can't afford the luxe of using such message.

and here is why :


1)twitter is in a dominant position regarding the micro-blogging sphere.
2)twitter serve people in real time, there is no delay no latency.

such situations are frustrating users.

would you stay a week without electricity?
would you stay a week without mobile communication?

there is a part of dependency that such service induce and that providers have to assume like users.

in such situation the elementary human reaction is "the search for alternative".

could organic search survive without google ? yes.
could social network survive without facebook? yes.
could the blog-shpere survive without blogger and wordpress? yes.
could the holly sharing file picture survive without filckr or picasa? yes.
could the wiki-universe survive without wikipedea? yes.

because there is always alternative.

so what are the alternative to twitter?

1)identi.ca
2)open microblogging.

some have to agree that they arn't so spreaded as twitter, jaiku got a chance to be a concurent of twitter but google killed that chance.

so to resume :

1 hour is a too much too big delay in a environment where change and information are expressed every milli-seconde. or less.

is it legitimate to ask what Plan B twitter has? what can twitter offer us if something go wrong for a long period?

hope they have one.

and hey in the universe of micro-blogging, micro-maintenance has a chance to emerge :)