How is downrightnow better than searching Twitter for “service X is down”?
Twitter Search is a good way to find out if other users are reporting problems with a particular service. In fact, that’s one of the sources downrightnow uses to find out about service issues. However, searching Twitter by hand quickly gets complicated. During an outage, one user might post a message that “hotmail is down”, but another user might say, “hotmail is giving me an error message”. It can take several searches to uncover reports that use different wording, so downrightnow monitors many keywords and phrases simultaneously to get a more complete picture of what Twitter users are saying. Instead of performing multiple Twitter searches by hand and scanning for relevant user postings, we do the legwork for you. downrightnow gives you a quick verdict on Twitter activity in addition to any company announcements and other relevant status information.
