Back in the early days of Twitter, it wasn’t uncommon to see the “Fail Whale”. It was a static image that the twitter servers displayed when they were overwhelmed or broken by an update. It meant that something had gone wrong, and it would be a while before we’d be back to messaging each other. (Twitter started as an easy way to do group SMS chats.)
It wasn’t a big deal when that happened. Most of us were still using RSS feeds to check news and get updates. Most people followed sites using Google Reader. But there were other versions of the same basic idea. NetNewsWire was a favorite that is still around. It’s simple in principle. News and blog sites publish a version of their updates in a format called Real Simple Syndication (RSS) and those programs were able to parse and display the articles and the updates. Atom was another typical feed format. Some programs presented the updates as if they were individual emails from a listserv. Some showed them like a scrolling set of cards. (Twitter ended using that format.)
Twitter was built on RSS and made it dead simple for people to subscribe to the updates from a website or a blog. Eventually, people just skipped setting up a website or a blog and started posting directly to Twitter. But the RSS underpinnings remain – you can subscribe to any Twitter account in an RSS reader, and you’ll get the updates automatically without needing to set up a Twitter account to read them. (I do this with some local journalists here in Rhode Island, for instance.)
If Twitter goes down again – shows the Fail Whale again – then it makes sense to have an alternative way to get news at the ready. Take a look at NetNewsWire if you’re on an Apple Device. It’s free and open source and brilliantly done. (There are similar programs for Windows.) Thunderbird, the Mozilla Foundation’s program for email, will also do RSS feeds. So does Outlook! If you are deep in the Apple ecosystem like I am, Apple News is an excellent way to get hard news in a curated feed. Microsoft Start is similar, though it doesn’t have as many good sources in my opinion.
You can always go back to Facebook. I’m told the Young like TikTok, but I’m an Old and not sure I get that one. But apparently plenty of people are getting their news and updates that way these days.
If Twitter is your main tool for keeping up with the World, it’s worth thinking of a backup plan. If the stories about the staff reductions are true, it seems likely we’ll be seeing the Fail Whale again. And maybe more often than not.
(The logo above is from the following website: Twitter twitter.com/errors/wh… Fair use, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.p…)
