ByteSizer

Twitter has been out of service since early morning PST, which means only half the breakfast for geeks and internet junkies like me.

Globally, Twitter has been down for more than a couple of hours as of writing of this post and it seems you may be getting ‘the whale’ for another sometime.

A note on the Twitter Status blog reads:

“We are experiencing site-wide availability issues due to scheduled  maintenance. We’re currently working to address the issues. We’ll update with more information as it is available.”

“Update: We’re currently experiencing site availability issues resulting from the failed enhancement of a new approach to timeline caching. Our infrastructure and operations engineers are currently working to resolve this. We’ll update you soon with an ETA.”

The outage was caused during a slick new feature being added, which supports geolocation. With it, you can tag your tweets to a specific place you’re at, or check-in from Foursquare and Gowalla, nothing we haven’t already been doing thanks to 3rd party clients.

The site may experience hiccups for upto 5 hours, and its a good time to catch up on your real-life friends on facebook, linkedin or wherever you can browse to. We’ll have the updates as they come from Twitter.

Update: 10:17 PM PDT: Users may temporarily experience missing tweets from their timelines. They will be restored shortly.

Update: 11:51 PM PDT: We’re  recovering from the site outage. Remember, users may temporarily experience missing or duplicate tweets from their timelines. Normal timelines will be restored shortly.

Twitter is slowly coming out of the outage and the internet globe seems to be moving again.

Share your comments on the outage below.

Farrukh Ahmed Social Media Over capacity, twitter, Twitter down, Twitter whale

From time to time, Google has added functionality to its products, particularly Gmail. It is quite worth keeping an eye on that ‘Labs’ link on top.

Today, I tell you about an exciting new use you could put your Gmail account to, reducing the number of open browser tabs (or windows) and making your Gmail box a step above others. You can add iGoogle gadgets into Gmail, and the best way to start off is to add the two hottest social media gadgets, Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s a step-by-step to enable the gadgets. You can find and add pretty much any gadget but the two below work best for me. Of course you can view them full-screen in place of your email rather than in the sidebar:

To install them, just do the following:

1. Go to Settings –> Labs, find “Add any gadget by URL” and activate it.
2. Find a XML gadget for Gmail or iGoogle.
3. Go to Settings –> Gadgets, enter the gadget URL into the text box and click Add.

These are the gadget URLs:
Twitter – http://www.twittergadget.com/gadget_gmail.xml
Facebook – http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/104971404861070329537/facebook.xml

That’s it!

Share other cool gadgets that you use in your Gmail box in the comments.

Farrukh Ahmed computers, google facebook, gadgets, gmail, google, google gadgets, googlegadgets, tips, twitter