Dude, where are my DMs? Derth of email updates gets my attention

Well Allen might not be writing about Twitter every day, okay well I don’t either, but starting sometime last evening I stopped getting email notification of DMs or follows on Twitter, and that got my attention.

I didn’t realize how much I depend on Twitter for fast updates. Okay, getting notification of follows isn’t too crucial to my existence, but not getting DMs, yeah that causes a little problem.

Like last night I was meeting the crew from Molson for a beer (of course) and DMs were zapping back and forth…except I didn’t get them until I was home. Oops.

This made me realize how important Twitter has become to many of us as a rapid communications tool and info source, but it hasn’t stopped there. Jennifer Leggio commented recently, on Twitter of course, that she had culled 100 feeds from Google Reader because she doesn’t go there often anymore. I asked a question recently about Twitter and RSS and got a similar response, Twitter is becoming more important than our once vital RSS readers.

So we have a single point service that is becoming vital to many of us, which means when something goes off the rails, we notice.

I can’t help but wonder if now would be a good time for Twitter to take some of their money and set up a series of relays on major hosts across the Net. SXSWi is coming up soon-no I don’t know if I’m going-which tends to put a huge load on Twitter, maybe a little pre-planning would be good.

Of course many of us also rely on Gmail, and when it goes down we go a little nuts (and we tend to then go to Twitter to get updates). I think it is more than a little ironic that the Internet was built on the concept and mantra of reliability and redundancy, but many of us have chosen to rely on single point services for our communications.

Maybe it isn’t just Twitter that should think about backup plans.

Tagged as: email, twitter, Web 2.0