I read about the reason twitter has been having outages recently. It struck me as interesting the idea that they anticipated traffic spikes from the world cup, an event that had been planned for more than a few years prior to it happening. This made me think, does twitter have a news team? Shouldn’t they? Even one person to monitor up and coming hashtags and world events that might spike the servers, or cause the twitter-verse to twingle?

I then thought that it might be cool if they took a few people and had them act as a Twitter ombuds(wo)men. If they saw a disjointed conversation of import from the non-twitter-savvy-hashtag-using-masses they could offer one up. I know there are 3rd party apps doing this in various ways, or things similar, but it seems that with today seeing Twitter as a powertool to the masses urge to share messages, news and ideas, we might just need Twitter paying closer attention to what is happening in and around the worlds neighborhoods.

I’m sure some will fear that this could lead to censoring of content. Maybe a legit worry, but then again when Twitter goes down we’re all being censored by the machine.

I’m also pretty sure that this not a new thought. Twitter has some smart folk working for them, some of who I know, and I’m sure they have reasons to be working on similar ideas or avoiding them due to problems I haven’t considered.

That said I think a Twitter Ombudsman is a good idea and one that might worth talking about.

Just a thought

Ryan

Via Brownie Points » Twitter fail whale sushi.

This is one strip to throw in your feed reader.

But this is hilarious!

Dilbert comic strip for 03/10/2009 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive..