I’m not going to talk about the fact that it’s by now proven that social networks (Twitter, mostly) often become the first source of breaking news (lacking accuracy and reliability – but hey, we like it short and direct).

I’m also not going to talk about Twitter’s lack of scalability and stability. It’s often usual to see the smiling fail whale whenever the two facts I mentioned before combine together.

Today, Twitter was down for one hour or so.  My first thought was “what in the world is happening capable of bringing twitter down to its knees?”. But the stupid whale wouldn’t say a thing.

I’d later find out it was some “sudden failure”. But I bet it was the combination of two episodes. A new earthquake on Haiti and @billgates (what took him so long?) joining Twitter. These were the trending topics the minute Twitter came back up and they stayed like that for some time.

(edit: the first episode would lead to a quite quick humorous response by @workforfood: an appropriate blue whale of death)

So, Twitter, here’s an idea. Next time you fail whale on me and something is happening in the world, get a static page with the top trending topics so we get a general idea of what’s happening. Either it’s #billgates, #earthquake, #haiti or #obama, we’d like to know. Kthxbye.

era @ LoureShopping

(These kiosks have a barcode reader and usually display the price and information about the products you wave in front of it)