---
layout: post
status: publish
published: true
title: Dark cloud looming

wordpress_id: 32
wordpress_url: http://new.martineve.com/?p=32
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categories:
- Technology
- Open Access
tags:
- ! '#DR10'
- Digital Researcher
- Vitae
comments:
- id: 21
  author: AJ Cann
  author_email: ''
  author_url: ''
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  content: Twitter has been a bit on and off this past week. More on than off today.
    You're right in not trusting all your data to "the" cloud - trust it to the clouds.
    Redundancy of online services is important. That way, the only way it can "fail"
    is if the internet goes away. If that happens, you'll have bigger things to worry
    about then your data.
- id: 22
  author: chris
  author_email: ''
  author_url: ''
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  content: little workaround for today's problems with twitter is to use tweetdeck.
    Put all your friends in a list. Put the list in a column. Only the 'myfriends'
    core timeline column got frozen, the other columns were fine. You can have one
    for your hashtag and that will work fine too.Another good couple of tools are
    http://wthashtag.com/Main_Page for archiving tweets off the cloud, and http://www.backupify.com/
    for making a pdf book of all your tweets. (it includes DMs so be careful who you
    send it to).
- id: 23
  author: Martin Eve
  author_email: ''
  author_url: ''
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  content: Thanks for the responses.I was initially just experiencing the frozen timeline
    but, by about midday, this had expanded to the error page I posted above; simply
    couldn't access my own page, profile or tweet button./me reaches for tweetdeck
- id: 24
  author: sallyosborn
  author_email: ''
  author_url: ''
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  content: Echofon (Twitter client) has been working all day, even though Twitter
    itself has indeed been down for much of it.
---
<p><a href='/images/uploads/2010/03/twitter-down.png'><img src="/images/uploads/2010/03/twitter-down-300x76.png" width="500" height="127"/></a></p>
<p>Tomorrow I plan to attend the Digital Researcher seminar day at the British Library.</p>
<p>It promises to be an excellent day providing insights on how researchers can best employ microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking/citations and many of the other nifty collaborative elements of the web that simply weren't there in the '90s.</p>
<p>I post this, today because, obviously, in a practice-driven seminar, there is expected to be a great deal of hands-on work. For instance, the event has its own Twitter hashtag (#DR10) and all participants have been encouraged to register Twitter accounts.</p>
<p>There is, however, a problem with entrusting all our data to the cloud. Twitter is down. My account originally had a frozen timeline. It is now entirely inaccessible. Obligatory screenshot provided.</p>
<p>When running events that depend on technology completely outside of our control, we become hostage to Silicon Valley. The centralization of services brings convenience at the expense of disempowerment. We only tend to notice this when service fail, but it is, in fact, an omni-present danger; vendor (including service provider) lock-in.</p>
<p>That said, let's hope the fail whale has disappeared by tomorrow.</p>