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API outage notification system?
What would be interesting to think about implementing, if I were doing this, is a way to notify users when a third-party site causes a socialthing! service interruption. Especially if st is aware of an external issue, as with the Flickr API (mentioned in the reply to the problem I reported yesterday).
This would have been useful to me yesterday @Twhirl when it suddenly dropped avatars b/c the Twitter API changed twice in a few hours. Other users complained about Twhirl, not realizing it wasn't the product's fault. It'd be unfortunate for people to leave st b/c of something that isn't your site. Generally, some users also complain about "features" of third party Twitter clients that are actually attributed to the API (like that max # of tweet requests you can make in an hour).
A possible downside to this may be notifying users that something is temporarily effed if they aren't already noticing it, although it might be worth it to users who are noticing errors to know it's not st.
You've probably thought about this already, it's probably a buttload of feedback mediation work but you guys do such a stellar job already, I can't help but think the idea may be useful and possible.
This would have been useful to me yesterday @Twhirl when it suddenly dropped avatars b/c the Twitter API changed twice in a few hours. Other users complained about Twhirl, not realizing it wasn't the product's fault. It'd be unfortunate for people to leave st b/c of something that isn't your site. Generally, some users also complain about "features" of third party Twitter clients that are actually attributed to the API (like that max # of tweet requests you can make in an hour).
A possible downside to this may be notifying users that something is temporarily effed if they aren't already noticing it, although it might be worth it to users who are noticing errors to know it's not st.
You've probably thought about this already, it's probably a buttload of feedback mediation work but you guys do such a stellar job already, I can't help but think the idea may be useful and possible.
I’m excited
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Inappropriate?Great suggestion! We've thought about this before (and ran into the same conceptual problems). To solve the problem of informing the unaware (or uncaring), maybe it could be on another page, so that when you suspect something is amiss, you might check to see if that particular service is having issues.
Assuming we get the usability down, there's still the issue of actually determining the state of a service. Currently, it's sometimes tough to determine this -manually-. What would be nice is a method that -always- is up, detailing the status of an API: sort of like the programmatic equivalent to a human-readable "maintenance" page.
In fact I'll implement that method in our API come to think of it. Heck, if we get good enough at determining the state of external API's, maybe we'll even throw that in there too.
Good point.
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this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?"...maybe it could be on another page, so that when you suspect something is amiss, you might check to see if that particular service is having issues."
-When errors display at the top of your lifestream it could contain the link that goes to the page informing users of a) the origin of a bug, if possible to pinpoint, b) at least the state of the bug fix (with of course, it always displaying a fix as 'in progress', ha). Complicated, may be overkill. I'm just an over-communicative product manager that writes stuff and expects it to happen, what do I know?
"...sort of like the programmatic equivalent to a human-readable "maintenance" page." -Yeah, you could display it like your shield status on Halo and other first person shooters! Holy sh*t I'm a loser! No seriously though, you're talking an automated system that checks the state of it, something like that?
Very cool. Thanks for discussing.
I’m excited
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