Don't Put All Your Tweets in One Twitter

Well, today people learned why not to put all your tweet in one Twitter when suddenly Twitter became unavailable for the better part of two hours or more. According to CNN the following is what took place.

"An attack on the social networking site Twitter shut the site down for about two hours on Thursday morning, causing headaches in the online community and glitches in other Web sites like Facebook."

This seriously hindered any communication over the system and according to the above quote beyond Twitter too.

This event started me thinking.

What if we woke tomorrow to find that Twitter was no longer available? What if tweeting went back to being just for the birds? What if...

I know personally that my own social networking projects would be greatly hindered. I'm guessing that most other people that have discovered the value of Twitter would find themselves in the same boat and sinking fast.

One would likely ask at this point if the only option available is to watch everything sink into the mud around you. Fortunately, the answer to that question is no.

The best way to ensure against great loss within the scope of a social network failing to exist any further would be redundancy. It's a word you often here in relation to computer hardware, but tying this into social networking is just as equally important for your ultimate online success with social networking.

So how do you create a redundant social network?

It's really not that difficult if the truth were known. You simply setup a second base of operations and invite your key followers from Twitter to join you also on FaceBook, LinkedIn, MySpace, or wherever you happen to be building your second network at.

The problem with this approach is soon you have a vast number social networking accounts and passwords and profiles and...

well you get the idea.

Fortunately there is an answer to this issue as well which comes in the form of a free service called Ping.FM. Ping.FM ties all your social networks together as one so that when you send a status to one place you send it everywhere. Or say you want to post a blog article, every service that you are involved with receives that blog article at the same time with Ping.FM, unless you specify something other than normal processes which I rarely if ever do.

Bottom line?

Choose redundancy instead of putting all your tweets in one Twitter. You'll be glad you did.