Later, you will tell me that your RSS reader missed this blog post
Overheard yesterday at Science Online - In the 1990s, one would say “sorry, your email didn’t reach me.” In the 2000s, one said “your email must have been eaten by my spam filter.” Now, one will say “alas, your email didn’t make it into my Gmail Priority Inbox!” A weak joke, but an interesting idea - do unreliable systems fulfil some social need? Hilary Mason is thinking along similar lines : How can twitter be so popular and successful if it’s down all the time ? We base statements like this on the assumption that quality of a web application maps linearly to the application’s stability. This is obviously true for most sites most of the time, but things get interesting at the edge where rare, unpredictable failure actually enables more complex human interactions around the service. Unlike e-mail, twitter etiquette doesn’t demand that you read or reply to every message from every person you follow (or who follows you). Combine that lightweight social touch with occasional tec