Last night something strange happened and it had Twitter in a tiz for a good few hours.
After a hard stressful day doing web design one of my wind-down rituals is a quick half hour comedy show on BBC radio on the iPlayer before bed. Last night though, there was no BBC website. The BBC website was down. News, iplayer, weather, in fact all BBC sites were gone and trying to load them only got a ‘server not found’ error.
A quick search on google showed countless tweets reporting the BBC website down with many people tweeting that the problem was due to a DoS attack or some big event happening in London or jokey remarks about spending cuts, the government and other topical issues.
Watching the tweets coming through thick and fast was very interesting and made me realise the power of communication that twitter and google can have. Minutes after the bbc website was down thousands and thousands of people knew and were speculating. The power of this has also recently been seen with the japan earthquake with people crowding outside apple stores to use the wi-fi to send tweets and message relatives.
Communication like this has power. Use twitter and facebook and other social media wisely and they can work for your business.