Interesting that it takes one major Internet company to break down (for even so short a time) before the mass population realize a truth that some Internet marketer's have known for 6 months or more.
First we must briefly describe “the incident” for those of you who were unaware the Internet burped, well a important piece of it at least, Tues. afternoon, Sept. 1st. More than 145 million users of Gmail's free and paid email services lost that service for more than an hour. Some thought it was a joke, some thought hackers. They all knew it was a crisis moment.
So in a time of crisis such as this, where does one go for support and answers. It is not like losing power at your house were you can go outside and see if other people around you have power or see if the street lights are on.
If you were one of the lucky people who knew to check Google's App Status Dashboard or even if you just Googled it the only results you were likely to get were just going to tell you they were aware of the problem and trying to fix it. That does not make you feel better about the problem as your social and business life came crashing down around you.
Were does one go to talk to other people in real time about problems. Problems that effect everyone that lives this Internet lifestyle. Of course the only reliable place to go in time of crisis, to get up to the minute real time information of this kind; Twitter.
Twitter really shined in that hour or so of Gmail's downtime. People who had not really been aware of it before, used it that fateful Sat. afternoon. They watched as their lives change before their very screens, so to speak. Twenty minutes after Gmail went down there were 156 tweets about the problem. So the first thing that needs to happen in a crisis like this happened. People came together to to make sure they were all experiencing the same thing. They had found their common bond with one another. Then in a matter of minutes I looked again and that number had grown expediently.
Google during this time also tweeted and posted on their blog confirming the outage and letting everyone know it was being fixed. At this point the news went viral with the help of bit.ly. Google posted the tweet leading to the blog post. Google has nearly 1.5 million followers and in a matter of minutes after posting the tweet, the link generated 8000 clicks and more importantly it resulted in 14,000 additional clicks due to various people retweeting it all over Tweetspace. That number of course final leveled out after 11k from that tweet and 18k overall.
I think what we have learned from all this is that Twitter is a big part of the national (Internet space) broadcast system. I think in the “real” world we have the Emergency Broadcast system and in Cyberspace we have Twitter and I don't know about you all but I sleep better at night knowing that twitter goes on tweeting, looking out for me even when I am sleeping.
The truth is, Twitter is important for our survival as an online species and we should all be taking advantage of it to better understand the virtual world and its inhabitants. Twitter is True Social Media.
