A sysadmin use for Twitter

March 31, 2009

We have some users that are interested in reading about technical system status updates and what the sysadmins are doing in general. The obvious solution is some sort of blog-like environment where sysadmins write things periodically, but the problem with an actual blog is that it takes too much time to write something, especially if we are in the middle of a semi-crisis.

Hence the attraction of Twitter. The short length of Twitter messages (and their lack of formatting) means that we simply can't write very much and in turn users can't demand very much (and can't get disappointed when we fail to turn out polished marvels of educational clarity). Twitter is also well supplied with clients, including command line clients, that are basically fire and forget; you type your message at a command line or into a text box, and you're done.

(I have seen Twitter described as micro-blogging, which is just what we want; something like a blog but much smaller and easier to deal with, and with lower social expectations from the people reading it.)

You could use a Twitter clone for this and host it yourself, but for this specific purpose I think you might as well use Twitter itself. Among other reasons, I suspect that many of the users who would be interested in this are the sort of people who already have Twitter accounts. (And if not, Twitter has syndication feeds.)


Comments on this page:

From 66.92.52.243 at 2009-03-31 01:24:22:

Lots of web-ish companies have been using Twitter (LiquidPlanner, Six Apart, MoveableType, GitHub are the ones I follow) to describe upgrades, outages, and the like. We started doing it a few weeks ago at $work and it's been a moderate success.

Immediate contact and issue resolution with your customers is a double-edged blade when the conversation is out in the world, but overall I think it's definitely a Good Thing.

Another thing we've been thinking about is a private Twitter feed for internal use only, containing more specific information that is useful to co-workers but shouldn't be exposed to the world. For that, we were thinking of something like laconica. Haven't gotten very far on it, though.

From 203.59.102.239 at 2009-03-31 03:37:03:

I suppose email is too baroque these days, but hopefully with the arrival of phones that support email maybe this will change.

By cks at 2009-03-31 08:38:25:

Email suffers from some of the same social expectation issues that blog entries have; because you can write substantial emails, some people will expect and demand that you do. (It's also more intrusive than a Twitter feed.)

From 83.90.230.146 at 2009-04-01 13:54:24:

One Twitter sysadmin example is http://twitter.com/infrabot - it's even controlled by an irc bot.

Written on 31 March 2009.
« There are three entry states for feed readers
The SSD boom and the theoretical multicore revolution »

Page tools: View Source, View Normal, Add Comment.
Search:
Login: Password:
Atom Syndication: Recent Comments.

Last modified: Tue Mar 31 00:48:16 2009
This dinky wiki is brought to you by the Insane Hackers Guild, Python sub-branch.