The Twitter Phenomenon

I was first alerted to Twitter by Jason Massie and Brent Ozar, two of a number of excellent SQL bloggers I follow on a regular basis. My initial reaction was that this was the Wal-Mart of narcissists and voyeurs, which probably explains why I was so drawn to it. After acknowledging its obvious (and excellent) social networking aspects, I doubted it could be anything more than Facebook lite.

A number of weeks ago, I saw the light. Whilst reviewing chapter 5 of my book, I decided to redo the screen shots of my virtualized clustered installation of SQL Server 2008, specifically the cluster validation wizard. Unlike Windows Server 2003, the parallel-SCSI shared storage bus is not supported in Windows Server 2008, so I used a trial version of StarWind, a 3rd party iSCSI storage solution. After noticing the trial version had expired, I decided to reinstall the whole environment, a process that would take many hours.

Whilst looking for the installation media, I opened Twitter and sent an update; "Installing StarWind iSCSI target". Thinking nothing more of it, I continued on with my work. Within minutes (and I mean minutes) a direct Twitter reply came back to me from the CEO of StarWind Software asking me how I found their product. Surprised, and a little suspicious, I explained what I was using it for. At that moment I was offered a complimentary version of the product, and an offer of whatever support I needed.

Now apart from the fact that this saved me many hours of work, I was amazed at what had just happened. The CEO was obviously subscribed to some sort of Twitter search engine alerting system that monitored the live stream of Twitter posts for certain keywords, no doubt part of their customer engagement strategy. This was arguably the slickest and most impressive form of customer service I had ever witnessed.

Since then, I've heard of a number of other amazing Twitter stories, all of which stem from its open, real time and searchable aspects. I can't help wonder about the potential this thing has, good and bad. Either way I'm completely sold. If you're left in any doubt, check out this TechCrunch interview with Todd Chaffee, whose VC firm just ploughed 35 million bucks into it.

Cheers

PS; Other than being a fan of their software, I am in no way associated with StarWind or any of their related products

Comments

[Brent Ozar]

There's been a lot of neat stories around the Twitter customer service angle. My favorite was this one:

http://www.horsepigcow.com/2008/12/10/whuffie-in-action-the-ups-story/

The sad part is that it won't scale well. In times of real problems, Twitter isn't an efficient way to handle large numbers of messages. @ComcastCares found this out when they had outages in Houston: their Twitter page was just a constant stream of, "@yourname please email us at comcastcares@comcast.com and we'll handle it." Over and over, that's all, because they couldn't handle the volume. Pretty funny and sad at the same time.

Glad you're liking it though! It's fun for right now, in the early days, before it really catches on and turns into a public equivalent of a Level 1 support line, hahaha.