Roleli Speaks

Twitter has been down for at least 30 minutes. I was following updates on the situation in Haitiincluding an aftershock that struck Haiti at 6.03 a.m EST this morning. Before twitter went down users on Twitter.com were reporting a smaller tremor in Haiti Pingdom reports that twitter has been down for close to 40 minutes at the time of writing. Has a huge rush to see what happening in Haiti caused this or is there a bigger problem? At 7:20 a.m. Twitter remains down, uptime for today is now running at 86%, which is not good.

The tragic earthquake in Haiti has once again highlighted the usefulness of Twitter. In the minutes that followed the earthquake the first voice from Haiti was over the Twitter streams. It its not only Twitter that has stood out the ability to 'tweet', i.e. send messages, using the smartphones such as the IPhone, Blackberry, Nokia and others. What this has done is allowed not only text but images to be tweeted in seconds. The phone has become powerful too. Useful Twitter Users Going back to Haiti, there have have been a some twitter users whose updates have proven useful. These accounts I have found helpful in following events in Haiti http://twitter.com/firesideint http://twitter.com/Fonkoze http://twitter.com/Louisoxfam http://twitter.com/carelpedre http://twitter.com/troylivesay http://twitter.com/fredodupoux http://twitter.com/RAMhaiti A quick search of Haiti turned up users retweeting, i.e. repeating, updates provided by those users and in effect they quickly became the cr...