On Twitter they only have 40,000 followers and as far as I know they have millions of users. So obviously most of their community has no idea what is going on.

As someone who has been in this type of situation with Viddler (though our longest period of downtime has only been a few hours in 5 years) I can sympathize with the amount of effort that is going on behind the scenes by their entire team. However, let this be a lesson for the rest of us in what not to do.

Update: And just like that they’ve sent out a second tweet. With their own Tumblr-powered blog being down I suppose their options were limited in how they can communicate with their community.

Update again: Tumblr has now published a post-mordem report on what happened, how they’re dealing with it, and how they hope it doesn’t happen again. No new information though the words do seem sincere.

I’m sure Tumblr, and everyone that was watching this all happen, learned a lot of lessons during this event.

Side note: Remember Brightkite? Oh what could have been.

/via Eric Brophy.

My site is setup to post links to Twitter, every 15 minutes, if there was a new post here on my site. I try to add a little context by adding the category before the Twitter status (e.g. “Link:”) and I also include the title of the note so that people can choose whether or not to click the link from Twitter back to my site.

But I could see this getting pretty annoying for some.

Someone whose opinion I value, Justin Blanton, had said in October 2007, on Twitter no less, that he didn’t like the whole “use Twitter to link to your blog” method of letting people know when you update your site. In some ways I agree with him but in others I find it fairly useful when I am not near Twitter to automate the process. I’m torn.

This process all started when I started to post mobile photos with my iPhone. At first they were going to Flickr and so I once Flickr updated the RSS feed for my photos, I had a script that would notify Twitter of the new photo. Once I began to post my mobile photos here on my site, I figured I would do the same thing.

This slowly expanded into, what is now, a script that will post to Twitter every single time I publish something to my site.

So, I ask – should I continue this? Is it annoying? It is useful? Should I only do it for mobile photos and nothing else? Please let me know in the comments.