Twitter reported its outage being caused by a denial-of-service attack. (Quick explanation: when skilled nerds/hackers write programs to flood a server with tasks and requests, so that the server is overloaded and taken down.) What happens when we come to rely on the social web for all kinds of things, and then those services disappear? Sure, we can all merrily hop over to the next one, but as Allyson Kapin pointed out, to a certain degree, we’d all have to start over on building our networks. Our social capital translates across platforms, sure, but the physical reconnecting of users to users is one big pain in the butt.

This all points to a larger problem with how market-driven application development can be highly problematic. Yes, it creates competition, but moreso, it creates closed networks and proprietary systems. Each service — Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, etc — uses its own private structure to amass our networks for us. While messages can be passed between them, there’s no way to really share the data that accumulates over time between services.

Twitter disappears, for example, and we all go over to FriendFeed. But I have probably a fifth of the community on FriendFeed that I have elsewhere, because I haven’t spent any time cultivating it. And I can’t immediately transfer all of my Twitter community to FriendFeed. I can check my Gmail contacts and see who’s on FriendFeed, but I can’t just say, “Bring over my Twitter group to this service.” That’d be problematic for anyone trying to make money off of building these services, I guess, if we could all just drop them and run. It reminds me of the same onus that contract-cancellation fees of the mobile networks put on subscribers to stick with them.

It also frightens me, to some extent, about the future of the Web when it comes to ubiquitous-yet-proprietary services. I think about what we might be dealing with today had something like email been developed as a proprietary service. Right now, email works the way that it does because there were early, agreed-upon protocols for transporting the information. Developers implemented service improvements and new ways to interact with email over time, but the fundamental-ness of those early protocols remains true today. Anyone can email anyone else. There is no, “wait, you’re on Gmail, I’m on Hotmail, we can’t talk to each other.”

(Nerd moment: Remember when the early online services were like this, btw? When AOL wouldn’t let its users access different parts of the Internet, like Usenet? Ah, the grand old days of walled gardens. And where are they now?)

In the case of social media services that focus on rapid-fire, short status updates, there is no agreed-upon protocol. I’m the worst kind of technologist when it comes to these things, too, because I know there’s a service that’s open source and based on open principles. It’s called identi.ca. Why don’t I use it, if I’m so worried? Because hardly anyone else I know does, because it’s not very pretty, and because I still can’t search my contacts to see who else is on. I’m a sucker, like everyone else, for ease of use.

So, what do we do? My heart says: all you smart designers and coders, go work on identi.ca and get it looking and working nicer. But my head knows that’s probably not going to happen, at least not right away… so I’ll just be here, staring at the blinking cursors, waiting for Twitter to come back up.

Happy new year!

Yesterday, Allyson Kapin of Rad Campaign and Women Who Tech pointed to the supposed Ten Commandments of Twitter and wondered how many we agreed with. Me? Some, I guess, but it got me thinking first about Twitter etiquette (Twitterquette? sounds like a dessert or a lawn game), and then other old and new netiquette issues.

It’s fascinating to watch unspoken rules evolve in new social systems over time, and then curmudgeonly frustrating when someone tries to write them down. I can see how religions all over the world got themselves into trouble early on. “Wait, when he said ‘honor thy father and mother,’ does that mean I have to go over for dinner every Sunday? Seriously?” I admire the TenCommandments dude for giving it a shot, but… yeah. Telling people how to act is going to irritate some of the people some of the time.

It’s curious to me because I’m a firm believer in using the tools however best you see fit, whatever fits your info-digestion style. Me, I use Twitter mostly to follow people I know in person (I’m training myself to finally stop saying “in real life,” btw, since it’s all real life), and a little bit to get breaking news. It’s been indicated to me in a passive way that I’m not participating in good Twitter karma by following everyone that follows me. There’s even an app that will check your mutual status called Twitter Karma. It’s a bogus “rule” slowly being imposed on a nascent system of social transactions.

It reminds me of 1994, when if you didn’t link back to someone in your little HTML page of family photos, there was bad blood between you after that. People, people, people! Come on. First of all, we’re all adults here. I see people I’m close with, that I’m following, that are not following me back. I know there’s a 99% chance it’s because I tweet too much for their diet, or their community, and I can understand that. (In fact, I’m going to have to clean out some high-volume tweeters this weekend myself.) The point is not for me to thus impose a new rule to counteract the karma rule, but to ask people to live and let live.

We all have different styles of communicating, yes? This is a point we can agree on? In fact, when I’m doing trainings and workshops on using new tools, it’s one of my main points: don’t let anyone else tell you how best to use the tool. Sure, you can take suggestions or follow someone’s lead. I’ve showed people how to use Twitter just to read news feeds, or just to know what their friends are up to, or to stay on top of tech trends.

In the end, social rules are going to evolve no matter what I say (le sigh, my power is not yet infinite and cosmic), and it’s going to be fun to watch these new sets play out. It’s kinda funny that, even after 20 years, you can still make a major social faux pax by not emailing someone back. We come up with all kinds of reasons in our little overactive brains: “she’s pissed at something I said,” “she never got the email,” “he never really loved me.” Maybe they just… forgot.

Oh! And here are the tutorials I promised. Well, at least for Mac Mail, and for Gmail… Thunderbird is still in the works, and here’s a good one you can watch for Outlook.

Listservs & Mac Mail:

Listservs & Gmail: