All right, so I'm not entirely sure if I'm using the famous "known unknowns etc etc" formulation correctly here, but bear with me. This is a short cry of existential pain about the connected world we live in, and how our reliance on it has introduced a whole new level of risk to business and anxiety to our personal lives.
Here's the thing: I had an email outage last week. (It may even still be going on, for all I know.) I didn't know I wasn't receiving emails until someone asked me over the phone why I hadn't responded to something. And you know what? I immediately thought that the problem was theirs, not mine. Because there's no symptom in my environment telling me my email's down - or, worse, intermittently down - and because I'm one smug, self-satisfied, savvy citizen, I just motor on, assuming that any glitches I notice out the window are nothing to do with me.
I only realised that I did indeed have a problem when I idly punched in the name of my ISP into the search box at Twitter. And, oh boy, was I enlightened. I am not alone! Also - I'm learning some really filthy new words.
Then I noticed that my spam filters aren't quite so clogged with the rubbish that normally accumulates in them. This gives me, if you will, a scientific observation that could have backed up an outage theory if I'd had one in the first place. But I didn't have an outage theory at all: the whole realm of service failure hadn't once occurred to me.
So, what should I do in the future? Become more paranoid? I'll certainly be leaping on Twitter ahead of Google next time something doesn't smell right in my environment.
As for customer support: well, who needs it? My ISP grew to prominence by embracing self-service as fully as possible to keep its prices down. The company had to improve its live agent customer service as competition increased. But now Twitter's here, it's absolutely inundated. Basically, everybody in the world can see every single complaint that's being made. You'd be a fool to go the normal customer service route and get a ticket in the closed system, wouldn't you? You're better off @-ing these guys on Twitter and getting some marketsquare attention.
My conclusion is that, after years of predicting this kind of live-action public-humiliation scenario for businesses, I missed the actual arrival of this era. I missed the moment when Google's real power over business passed to Twitter. Don't you miss it too.
Erase this belief from your memory circuits: "What I don't know can't hurt me." What you don't know could be destroying you.
