Today is a difficult day for me. I’ve become dependent on a number of tools to help me get work done and particularly to manage my social media needs. I blog, I write articles and I’m an author. I use Twitter as a quick way to interact with others, let people know when I’ve written a new article or blog, and even to help market my novels. But since I use Twitter so heavily and since I follow so many people, I use Hootesuite to manage my twitter needs.
And today Hootesuite is down. And it’s all Amazon’s fault. Really, it is. Along with selling books, Amazon also sells cloud web services to other companies. Now for a company like Hootesuite, using Amazon’s services means they can launch their cool social media tools without having to set up a huge server farm. But it also means if the Amazon service goes down, they go down. And today Reddit, 4Square and other sites when down with them. And they have all been down most of the day.
Now, Twitter itself is still operating. But that’s just reinforcing how much I depend on Hootesuite. Every time I want to tweet from a different account, I have to log out of one account and log back into the other. I can’t access all my lists and searches at a glance, but have to switch views each time. I can’t really handle viewing updates from a few thousand people at once, so I normally check them out by groups. Today that’s gone and with it a sort of logical coherence that hootesuite lets me create for twitter.
The more we use social media, the more dependent we become on the tools that help us manage it.