Random Twits

It seems over the past weeks, more and more people are plugging themselves into twitter.

I personally have been getting some random followers on twitter over the past week and what a week it was. Been trying to implement some design and backend changes to my new site... only to discover to my horror that mediatemple's grid server cluster went down (with my site and all my clients' staging content in it)

It's midweek and James from Climbing Hills Records was expecting to see the finished product of his site. I was going to go through the standard procedure of moving the approved staging content to his hosting server but failed to login to mt. Abit of snooping around on their site found me at a "server status" page where it showed a class red severity of the current situation.

I owed the Record company a huge explanation for what was already a delayed upload date and a "sorry" was going to be professionally irresponsible.

I opened a ticket to mt and shot them a support request - estimated time 20 hours. Good grief, the situation must be really bad. I thought about all the larger companies and operations hosted by this server cluster and man, they are going to be pissed.

Oddly enough, they got back to me in about 20mins and apologised for the inconvenience, reinforcing that credit compensation would be acknowledged. Excellent service and surprising response imo.

Having read the response, I hit the sack praying that my clients wouldn't use this scenario as ransom for future project negotiations. Having earlier twitted my surprise that mediatemple servers were actually capable of going down, I responded to it by commenting on the swift public relation service mediatemple had.

Here's where the random twittering business began...

I awake the next day to find my CFO has added me to his following list.
The Sales Director from mediatemple follows me.

I shouldn't be bothered by it in this day and age of RSS feeds and keyword searches, but it feels weird to have your name Googled and then see the effects of it. Don't get me wrong, I'm totally appreciating the degree of connectivity in present day web technology.

Conversely, I've been thinking about the exact opposite as a yardstick for how far networking has come. Anyone remember this awesome book by Roald Dalh?


The house in which the Twits lived in had no windows and they were terribly anti-social. I know twitter calls its posts "tweets" - a reference to something I believe "a little birdie told me." But twitter itself is spelt with an 'i' and I just find it interesting how this anti-association exists.