As I write this Google's Gmail is down and millions ,somewhere around 113 million users, have no access to their email and the only information coming from Google is "We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a small subset of users.
The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an
update by February 24, 2009 6:30 AM PST detailing when we expect to
resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an
estimate and may change"
Chris M had already blogged about how Twitter had helped him out while he was Gmail-less. So to keep up with the developments I turned to Twitter, a 'micro-blogging' platform I use sporadically when I am bored (ironically notoriuos for the amount of downtime experienced by it's users).
The problem I now had though, was that I purposefully keep the number of people I follow to a minimum so how was I going to keep up with developments being tweeted by the thousands of Twitter-ers?
Enter Tweetdeck. A utility I have known about for some time, checked out more than once but never gotten the impetus to install. It took a quick Adobe Air install and a quicker application installation and voila Tweetdeck was up and running. But how does this help?
Tweetdeck allows you to initiate a phrase search, this appears in a separate column in the application and then updates this column as new tweets that match the search appear. This is not limited to those you follow!

So now I sit back and watch 10 sec updates of the worldwide confusion, frustration and anger as they come to terms with the potential pitfalls of keeping your emails in the cloud!

Labels: down, gmail, outage, problems, tweetdeck, twitter

Posted by roygbiv on Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at 1:54 PM | Permalink