A new strategy for Twitter outages
Monday, April 21, 2008 by Dave Winer.
Okay, I've bit the bullet, I'm going to change what I do when Twitter is down. 
1. When Twitter is down I will post updates to an RSS feed.
http://twitter.scripting.com/daveRss.xml2. You may follow this feed in any tool that can follow an RSS feed. These include FriendFeed, Jaiku and of course many others.
I want to accumulate a list of services that can follow RSS feeds in a Twitter-like fashion (i.e. river of updates). If you know of others, please post a comment here, with detailed user-level instructions for following a feed. I will try to figure out how to add a feed to my profile on FriendFeed. (Any help would be appreciated.)
I feel pretty good about this. I have a nice tool that I might use even when Twitter is up. 
Update #1: I've fixed FriendFeed so it's now following, in addition to the feed for scripting.com, and my Twitter and Flickr accounts, also my "rainy day" feed, above. So, if Twitter goes down, you can just start using FriendFeed instead if you want to follow my tweets. Pretty cool. Let's hope they know how to scale!
Update #2: Here's a screen shot that illustrates items from the rainy day feed showing up in my FriendFeed stream. If you follow me over there, you'll get the updates automatically, you don't have to do a thing.
Update #3: Here's a screen shot of the outliner-based tool that I use to author the rainy day feed. I've turned off the connection betw Twitter and FriendFeed, so I'm now committed to using this tool to author my Twitter stream. I think it'll be okay. Already my posting volume is back to normal, even though the Twitter outage persists.
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"The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web. "Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
Dave Winer 
My most recent trivia on Twitter.
