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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 technical issues and human communication patterns, and we start to see some interesting behavior.

Twitter’s lack of reliability as a platform allows us to use the technical failings to mask our own social imperfections. How often have you heard or said something like “I was sure I was following you” or “I must not have gotten that DM” or even “I think I tweeted that…”?

 The ability to politely ignore at least some of our incoming messages has existed for a long time - even post was never totally reliable.  If our online systems do tend, over time, to become more reliable, perhaps we will just lie about them to cover our own foibles?