What if this afternoon your Twitter feed was offline?
Ironically, after praising Twitter yesterday for helping my solve my RSS feed problem, the service was out for a couple of hours in the late afternoon on 5/14. It is interesting how addicted I am to the Twitter feed for get up-to-date information from my trusted network.
What if this morning your digital newpaper didn't arrive?
Imagine waking up and finding out
that you have zero
newsfeeds pending to
read. What happened...did everyone decide to boycott
the Internet? Could there actually be no updates to
the 34 feeds that I normally follow? The silence is
eery...almost like something out of a horror movie or
a Twlight Zone episode.
Unfortunately, the moment of insanity passes
and Occom's Razor takes over. The simplest
solution is the best...there must be something
wrong with the mechanism that is updating my
NetNewsWire feeds. So I start at the beginning and
assume sleep is to blame and stop and restart the
application. No effect. After hitting the Refresh
All button five or six times hoping that it would
automatically start up again, I decide that I need
to fix it.
Dismayed and annoyed, I vented my frustration by
sending a status update to all my social networking
sites using MoodBlast. Suddenly it dawns on
me...maybe it isn't only me. Rather than searching
the forums to find a solution, I decide to see if
anyone else is complaining on Twitter. No one in my feeds are having
the same problem?!?! However, I do get my news fix
on how Team Slipstream is doing in the Giro.
However, when I go to Summize, I hit the Jackpot! Not only is
there a description of the problem, but someone
has already provided a solution...NewsGator is the
problem and remove the synchronization from your
preferences within NetNewsWire. Suddenly, the RSS
feeds load and I have 104 new feeds to read.
Maybe, I shouldn't be so happy.
This was a very illuminating experience on our
dependence on and the power of new Web V2.0
communication methods...i.e. RSS Feeds and
Twittering. In record time, I was back up and
running...the free and quick dissemination of
information will dominate the future of the
Internet.
A Bag of Nails
Once upon a time there was a little
boy with a bad temper. His father gave him a bag of
nails and told him that every time he lost his
temper, he should hammer a nail in the fence. The
first day the boy had driven 37 nails into the fence.
But gradually, the number of daily nails dwindled
down. He discovered it was easier to hold his temper
than to drive those nails into the fence.
Finally the first day came when the boy didn't lose
his temper at all. He proudly told his father about
it and the father suggested that the boy now pull out
one nail for each day that he was able to hold his
temper. The days passed and the young boy was finally
able to tell his father that all the nails were gone.
The father took his son by the hand and led him to
the fence.
"You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in
the fence. The fence will never be the same. When you
say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this
one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out, it
won't matter how many times you say 'I'm sorry', the
wound is still there."
Source: A Old Buddhist Tale