Kevin Mesiab reflected today on Twitter on how the world has changed through our use of Twitter, TwitPic, etc., and what 9/11 would have been like with them around. While it certainly doesn’t hurt to stop and think for a minute how fast things change and which tools or services bring that change about, I think we need to take a step back and consider how well these things might hold up in a crisis. Because the truth is, they won’t.
Twitter is notorious for its outages and slowness. The last few days have had my client complain almost constantly about Twitter being down. And recent events haven’t exactly proven Twitter and TwitPic as beacons of stability. The Hudson River landing of an airplane may have been first announced on Twitter, but TwitPic became inaccessible soon after images of the plane were posted there. And that was a non-event compared to 9/11.
These technologies simply do not scale. With radio and television, it doesn’t matter how many people are watching the same channel. That’s the point of a broadcast, it gets thrown out there and you can pick it up if you want. Anything that involves a two-way network, like Twitter, websites, IPTV, etc., transmits its information to individual recipients. That means that when one million viewers want to see the same thing at the same time, you have to have one million times the server power than if you had just one viewer (things are a bit more complicated than that, but it’s good enough for this discussion). Those resources have to planned for and/or brought online in a crisis very quickly, or your service becomes unresponsive. In most cases, that is simply not possible.
This is why we need to keep one-way broadcast systems around. There are obvious advantages to IPTV and web-based systems of all sorts. But I am afraid that we are getting so dependent on them and neglect the old-fashioned ones, that we are becoming more vulnerable.
