Archive for 2009

Twitter.com is currently unavailable. The homepage has been replaced by a cute caterpillar and a talking ice cream cone (below).

CNN is reporting the “situation” as breaking news. What happened? A hacker? A massive snafu? Rolling blackouts? In fact, this was planned maintenance. Every site will have some unavoidable, hopefully planned, downtime. While it’s rare for a site the size of Twitter to be down for all users during the middle of the day, apparently Twitter found it necessary today. Such outages are usually announced in advance, as was the case at Twitter today (http://status.twitter.com). As seen in the screen capture below, today’s site-wide outage was publicly announced yesterday. I suppose most users don’t read the Twitter Status page. Maybe a heads-up on the home page would have communicated the issue more effectively.

Earlier today I wrote about an issue I explored this morning in the way certain older accounts were accessed on PBworks.com (my favorite site for organizing my non profit’s fundraising events). I thought the issue warranted PBworks’ attention, and tried to reach them directly right away.

Unable to connect with anyone quickly, and not finding any direct connections via my LinkedIn account, my brother advised me to blog about it here on my site. I have since deleted the contents of that post, as the issue has now been addressed and I don’t see any positive purpose in leaving the post up.

Late this evening, Boston time, I was able to speak with PBworks’ PR chief, who was probably less than thrilled to be getting a dinnertime cellphone call from some chick on the East Coast wanting to tug his ear about a suspect UX encounter (every site has bugs; it’s not a big secret!). But he was gracious and attentive, and a few minutes later I got a call back from the founder of PBworks.

These guys took my concerns seriously, listened to my bug description, and got QA on it straight away. Basically just what you’d hope to find out about a big player–that they care about the individual users and about making the user experience safe, secure, and comfortable for all.

I feel confident that the issue I picked up on is being addressed and that my account information is safe in PBworks’ hands.

Now if only PBworks could handle all my non-profit fundraising itself, and not just the information management of it…