Mashups and Single Points of Failure
Wednesday, June 24th 2009 | Ismael Ghalimi
Mashups are great, but the more components are integrated into a single mashup, the more single points of failure are created along the way. I experienced this recently with the piping of my blog feeds to Twitter. Blogs were written using WordPress, syndicated through FeedBurner (now owned by Google), harvested by TwitterFeed, and re-syndicated to Twitter. Somewhere in the process, delays would be created, one day long for posts on IT|Redux, and over a week long for posts on ghalimi.name. Since I control both the source (my WordPress account) and the target (my Twitter account), there wasn’t much need for FeedBurner in the middle, so I recently got rid of it. Let’s see if this fixes the problem.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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When starting with Twitter, I took advice from my coworkers, and one of them told me to use that medium for human written messages rather than retweeting their feeds. Even if you are just linking to a resource, it’s best to do it with a bit of a human touch. You will be more entertaining and you will touch more people that way. Also, people who are interested into your feed will subscribe directly to it. If they see that the same content is broadcasted on Twitter, they might not follow you there.
Well, I tend to view Twitter a bit differently. To me, this is the place where you can find what I’m doing/thinking, alongside many life dimensions (personal, professional), hence I use it as a broadcasting aggregator.
I see. I was tempted to do the same thing at some point and point people to my feed when they want to keep in touch, and I might come back to it. Even though, Twitter is nice to do small talk and gossip, so I would include Twitter in my aggregated feed, not push everything to Twitter, to keep the noise/signal ratio low. At some point it’s just a matter of taste I guess.
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