Anyone else hate status announcements via twitter

**stevech** · 11-30-2010 10:57 PM

Originally Posted by VOIPoTim

...most people use Twitter is ....

Most? Wrong

**stevech** · 11-30-2010 10:58 PM

dupe - - - snip

**stevech** · 11-30-2010 11:00 PM

Employer's firewalls block twitter, gmail, yahoo, hotmail et al.
Websense polices blacklisted IP addresses/URLs.

It's a different world in corporate land than in startups and private PCs.

**ctaranto** · 12-01-2010 09:56 AM

I personally despise TwitBook sites. But, using Twitter for outages is great.

I reluctantly created a Twitter account (just for voipo), subscribed to voipo, and have it SMS my mobile phone. I get up to the minute updates of service and offers right on my phone, and never had to install an app nor worry about firewalls.

**scott2020** · 12-02-2010 12:40 PM

Originally Posted by stevech

Most? Wrong

C'mon man. What he said was "The reason most people use Twitter is that it's easy to update..."

He's not saying most people use Twitter. He is saying out of the people who do use Twitter, most chose to use it because it is easy to update, etc.

Twitter is easy to use, fast, and has multiple ways to obtain information from it. It is off VOIPo's network infrastructure, so it can be updated in the event of a major failure. I can't count how many times VOIPo had datacenter issues back in the day, where the phone service was down, forums were down, main web site was down, etc. I haven't seen that happen in awhile thank goodness.

That being said, I can't get to Twitter and other social networking sites from my work computer. I would rather check here or at DSLR. The problem is 90% of VOIPo's subscribers don't know what DSLR is! But I would guess a majority know what Twitter is.

I would think a separate site with the status would help, with RSS feed, but there has to be an easy way the average Joe can use it.

**stevech** · 12-02-2010 02:43 PM

GEEZE. VoIPo runs forums.voipo.com, right? Can't they have a section that's read-only for users to see notices of importance? Most forum software allows one to get emails triggered by a posting topic you subscribe to. This avoids the blocked Twitter issue.

GEEZE.

Not only soc8ial websites, but webmail and file sharing (like pogoplug) are blocked in corporations. It's nasty out there in firewall land.

**holmes4** · 12-02-2010 10:29 PM

There is an advantage to having a source of information not in the same infrastructure as the service. I have seen many issues where network problems take out an entire company, including its forums or news page.

One of my web hosts keeps a page on another unrelated host specifically for "status" messages. But Twitter is an easy to use method that many people already use. (My employer does not block Twitter.)

My gripe is that Voipo is slow to "tweet" about problems acknowledged in the forum, but they are getting better.

**stevech** · 12-03-2010 01:13 AM

I would think that VoIPo, being in the VoIP biz, not the web server hosting biz, would have the Jelsoft forum hosted in a different data center.

**holmes4** · 12-04-2010 02:57 PM

And as it happens, it is. The forums are hosted by hostingservices.net. The IP is owned by Hosting Services in Providence, Utah, but the actual server appears to be in Chicago.

**scott2020** · 12-06-2010 06:16 AM

I believe most of VOIPo uses Softlayer's network, including the www, forums, and back end database stuff. If there is latency in Softlayer's network due to an attack, network failure, etc, it can take down several things. That is why it is important to have an outside status page, but I would rather have a page with RSS like was posted in another thread. There are probably tools out there that would update a "blog" type page, twitter, facebook, and all of that stuff at one time.