the goose

Agtweet has been going through the wars recently.  A combination of simple mistakes, expiring credit, tripping over cables, twitter connectivity issues and getting snowed in in the Wicklow mountains, all conspired to patchy service.  In my experience, these things come along like buses, in clumps of 3 or 4.  We’ve had about 7 months of pretty continuous service but over the last few months there have been problems.

All of which results in posts like …

and …

and one or two more that weren’t as polite.  These guys are right of course.  Even though these guys are using the service for free, you can still expect a certain amount of flack if you don’t do what you said you were going to do.

What makes the problem more acute is the fact that @agtweet is “line of … “, well, I was going to say “line of business”.  In other words, if you service isn’t working for any amount of time you can expect to get some flack, un-subscriptions and bad karma.  This was also a problem for smartnote.ie when I offered inbound SMS services.  You see, for someone like me, who operates from a laptop, quiet possibly at the other end of the earth, I’m not always around to look after these things.  Nor, to be honest, do I really want to be, and this is in a way what makes ‘line of business’ type applications not very virtual.  To support them properly, you need a support contract with an IT supplier at the very least, or even full time support, whenever your customers can expect to be using the service.

Piehole the Irish voice over directory doesn’t quiet suffer from the same problem.  If some over-zealous code push does mean can’t update their photo for a couple of hours/days, it is not the end of the world.  The same cannot be said for many ‘webapp’ style systems.  If they go down, customers go mad.  This makes them not all that virtual and maybe not suitable unless you’ve got a plan that involves enough scale to warrant a support desk.