Twitter On Ulitzer

When Google's Gmail is down, thousands complain on Twitter. If Amazon has problems with its cloud services, you hear about it on Twitter. If a web hosting company has issues, you hear about it on Twitter. Twitter has given consumers a voice, and companies are listening.

In other words, Twitter has become a discovery engine for service issues. But only if people effectively let the world know about those issues in the first place.

Pingdom, a service that monitors the reliability of websites and services on the Internet, has now made it possible to automate this process. Pingdom users can choose to automatically send Twitter status messages when their monitored sites have downtime, notifying not just themselves, but the world.

"Using social media such as Twitter to reach out is very good for transparency and certainly helps you get attention to a problem," says Sam Nurmi , CEO of Pingdom. "We monitor hundreds of thousands of websites and online services for our users, and the differences we see in hosting reliability are staggering. Many providers leave a lot be desired. Those are the ones that need a wake-up call."

Public knowledge of service issues will have a positive long-term effect because reliable providers will be rewarded, while unreliable providers will lose customers. This will give negligent providers a strong incentive to improve, which in turn will raise the overall quality of hosting and services on the Internet. In short, it will make the Internet better.

"We are seeing the start of an era when providers won't be able to hide poor service," says Sam Nurmi . "We here at Pingdom want to help out 'the little guy' by letting people combine our monitoring service with Twitter. We have even made it possible for anyone to use our service for free, because a better Internet would benefit all of us."