Ok, so Twitter is currently down. I know this because TitsUp.net told me so.

IsTwitterDown.com says it’s working.

DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com is returning a 502 error itself so I don’t actually know if it can tell that Twitter’s not working.

So in short, use TitsUp.net - it’s better than the rest!!

I was a bit bored the other day but managed to find something to do. Something reminded me of a guy I used to work with who used the phrase “It’s all gone tits up” a lot. He headed up the test team so he had reason to use it!

I don’t really know why but I decided to log in to my Gandi account and checked the availability of titsup.*, found that titsup.net was available and registered it.

The result of all this is that I’ve developed a simple website to check if a given URL is working. There are other sites that do this, mainly in response to Twitter downtime, but in an effort to differentiate TitsUp from those it has two features I couldn’t find anywhere else.

It can check a domain name like the others, but you can also enter a complete URL and it will check that. It follows all redirects until it reaches a destination and it also lets you know exactly what went wrong rather than just saying whether it’s working or not.

The other feature is only evident if the URL you check is not working. TitsUp will offer to check a failing URL every 10 minutes for the next 24 hours. If it starts working you’ll get an email telling you the good news. If it’s still not working after 24 hours you’ll get an email saying so. It can also optionally notify you in both cases via a direct message in Twitter thereby allowing you to get an SMS notification as well as an email. Note that for this to work you’ll need to follow the titsup user.

As a simple tool I think it works really well. I’m interested in any opinions people might have so please let me know what you think. Now all I need to do is create an icon for the site and Twitter user. Anyone fancy giving that a go?

Over the weekend I wrote a script to post new ads from Freeads Classifieds on Twitter. For me this was primarily a technology experiment but it may prove useful to someone so I thought I’d let everyone know about it.

Follow @ukfreeads to get the ads in your timeline. You can also see the 100 most recent ads or subscribe to the RSS feed on the main Freeads Classifieds site.

Let me know if you find it useful or have any other comments.

While catching up on Twitter this morning I came across a blog post by David Cushman on the simplicity of riding a bicycle compared to using ebay or iTunes.

I kinda see what he’s saying, but as he points out I think it has more to do with what people are used to. His daughter has almost certainly seen people riding bikes so I would suggest she picked up the general idea through observation rather than it being particularly intuitive. While it’s not likely to happen I’d love to see how someone who’s never seen a bike would go about working out how to ride it.

On the most basic level there is also a fundamental difference in complexity between riding a bike and using things like ebay and iTunes, but I’m certain that if someone new to them were to watch someone else use them for a short period of time they’ll pick it up quickly enough.

On his point about successful copies needing to work in the same way as existing products I agree to a certain extent, but mainly from a commercial point of view. It’s pretty safe to say that the user-friendliness of any product can be improved, but radical departures from well-known interaction are very difficult to sell so improvements tend to be incremental.

I personally thing designing great user experiences in the digital world is harder than it is in the physical world, but purely because it’s a new world to the vast majority of people. In the digital world I think one of the main problems is that most systems (both hardware and software) are designed by technical people who are far more interested in solving the technical problems than concerning themselves with the user experience. I get the impression this is changing slowly but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

For me the key thing to do when designing a software feature is to forget as much of what you know about software as possible and approach the problem as if you rarely go near a computer. The other day my mother managed to accidentally lock her Vista laptop (presumably with WinKey+L) and the screen it presented her with was one she’d never seen before so she started to panic thinking she’d lost a whole load of work. While this accidental locking may be an edge case for a developer it’s one that I’m sure more than a few people have triggered and paniced over. A little more thought about how the locked screen looks could have eased the panic without compromising the purpose of the feature.

Unless you’re developing an IDE or other development related software just remember…. you are not your user. Keep that in mind at all times and it will hopefully make you think about what reaction a particular interface will evoke in the average housewife. Will it scare them? Is it similar to something they’ve seen before? Is it overly scary (big yellow triangles containing black exclamation marks for example)?

Does anyone else have tips for developing software and websites for “everyone else”?

This is really daft. It’s been widely covered recently that the BBC iPlayer service is taking off in a big way which is great news for the future of TV. Unfortunately some ISPs are throwing their toys out of the pram and complaining that the increased bandwidth usage is costing them a lot of money and that the BBC should help cover the cost.

This strikes me as an extension of the equally stupid claim that it’s ok to have fair usage limits on unlimited broadband packages. The ISPs provide connectivity to their users and it’s up to them to set their terms of use. If they feel they need to bring in more cash to cover the additional costs incurred by these additional services they should price their packages accordingly, but they should also do so as transparently as possible and not try to pass the cost on to content providers and certainly not to the tax payer.

The BBC is providing a great service, but they’re by no means the only organisation to be causing increased bandwidth usage. ITV, Channel 4 and Five all have video on demand services but the ISPs haven’t complained about them, almost certainly because they haven’t been anywhere near as popular as the iPlayer service but they’re still contributing to the increased load.

Then consider the other streaming video services such as YouTube and Vimeo. Why haven’t the ISPs gone after those services? Could it be that they think the BBC is an easier target because it’s publicly funded?

In my opinion ISPs should concentrate on providing the service they advertise themselves as offering… namely reliable internet connectivity. In addition they should be more accurate in the descriptions of their packages such that hidden limits like fair usage policies are pushed to the top of their marketing material. An 8Mb “unlimited” connection with a 3GB monthly fair use limit is not unlimited by any definition of the word and it’s particularly limiting in this world of streaming video and other high-bandwidth services.

The ISPs need to wake up and recognise that they’ve fallen behind the curve and they need to commit some serious investment to upgrade their infrastructure so it’s ready for the next step up in bandwidth demand. Yes it will take a lot of money and probably a fair amount of time, but personally I’d rather pay 50 quid a month for a fast, reliable, properly unlimited connection than a tenner for one that’s slower than the advertised speed and limited in ways that make it practically useless for today’s internet.

It seems to me that they just want to take your money and provide the minimum service they can without you complaining about it. It’s up to the consumers, yes I mean you, to raise the bar for them and demand decent service and transparent advertising. As with all services you buy, if your ISP isn’t performing well enough, change it.

Last night I finally got access to the full public feed from Twitter. I’ve written a daemon in C to push all tweets received into a DB and knocked up a little toy to test that it’s working.

Random Tweet

Doesn’t do much, just displays a random tweet from the past hour. Probably not useful to anyone besides me but I’ve found it quite interesting to see the random crap people tweet about, maybe you will too.

Next step is to feed this data into Tweetmeme and a couple of other ideas I’ve got, but need to make sure this is 110% stable first.

This thing is freaking amazing. Some serious maths going on in there!