Usually when Twitter goes down it happens in the middle of some sort of event that causes a rush of tweets. Today is just a regular old lazy Sunday, and yet here we are, with it being down.
It’s so lazy, in fact, that no one is even bitching about Twitter being down on FriendFeed, even though it has been for a good 30 minutes now. There is also no update on the status blog. It’s weird. It’s eerie. Twitter is quietly down.
It is really news anymore when Twitter goes down? Not really. But they’ve been doing such a good job at staying up for a while now that hiccups like this and the one last week are at least worth noting. Especially when new COO Dick Costolo emphasizes how Twitter will have absolutely no problem scaling going forward.
As always, you should study up on our list of 15 alternate things to do when Twitter is down.
Update: And she’s back. A little over a half hour of downtime it looks like.
Update 2: Deja vu? Looks like Twitter has a canned message for the Status page to note downtime, so I’m not sure why it takes them so long to get it up. It’s smart to default to “about” 10 minutes ago though when it’s really “about” triple that.
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Just a quick reminder that today is the last day to submit your nominations for our third annual Crunchies Awards. We’ve received over 100,000 nominations so far, but just in case you’ve forgotten, go here right now and add some more. You have until midnight PT tonight.
Once all the nominations are in, the Crunchies Committee will choose five finalists per award category. From there, the popular voting will begin on December 21 and run through January 6, leading up to the live ceremony Friday, January 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm PT the Herbst Theater in San Francisco which we’re pleased to be co-hosting with GigaOm and VentureBeat. The full rules are here.
Again, nominations end tonight at midnight, so get them in.
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Twitter’s Retweet functionality, which has caused so much consternation appears to have disappeared not long after it was introduced last month.
The Retweets area in the right side bar has gone and the RT function button on people’s profiles has gone as well.
The design of the Retweet feature created huge confusion over how RTs were attributed, plus different client applications treated RTs differently. Retweets of these retweets were even worse.
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First of all, yes, everyone on Twitter now should have access to the new Retweet functionality. Currently, only Twitter.com and a handful of clients support the new mechanism. But did you know that you can also trigger the new Retweets via SMS?
As the Twitter mobile account noted earlier tonight, if you simply send “RT USERNAME” to 40404 (at least in the U.S.) it will automatically retweet the last tweet of whatever username you entered has sent. And yes, it will be a new-style Retweet.
If you love the new Retweets, that’s a great feature. If you hate them, well, then, you’ll hate this too. For more on that, see here.
Regardless, Twitter’s quick moves to expand and extend mobile support is pretty impressive.
A couple other things worth noting about Retweet now that it’s live for everyone:
1) You can stop seeing the new Retweets from any user simply by clicking on their profile and making sure the rotating arrow badge under their name is not green.
2) New style Retweets do not show up in your @replies section. To see them, you have to go into the new Retweets section and click on the “Your tweets, retweeted” area.
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