I was just done reading Alexander Muse’s post about Microblogging being a mess and just as I was going to twit about it, Twitter was (you guessed it) down with a link to this thread at Get Satisfaction. I happened to read through it only to find people saying downtime is “fine” because the product “is free”. Actually, downtime is not fine, even if the product is free – free shouldn’t mean that failure is acceptable.

Just because it’s free, it doesn’t mean it has no value

Let me put it this way. Gmail is free and yet I’d personally panic if it suddenly went away. Google is free too, and we use it all the time. Free doesn’t mean “allowed to suck”, or stand for “acceptable downtime”. Free products like Gmail, Google, Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed still have a value. What you’re not giving away in dollars (or in our case here, Euros), you’re giving away in data and attention.

Sure, I’d be bitching often if Twitter was down and I had paid money for it. But even if I haven’t, they have my data, their service still is the vehicle through which people hear from me at a more personal level. I have invested in this service with my own attention. I don’t have a particular number for how much that’s worth, but it’s definitely not a zero.

It’s about you, the user

This isn’t a rant against Twitter. They’re not the ones saying we should accept their downtime because they provide their service for free. Real people are saying this. Personally, I don’t think these people understand the value of their own presence and data. Don’t want to be frustrated because a service is down? It’s definitely your right not to be (and I’m glad – we as a species are already way too stressed out as we are). But don’t underestimate your own value, or think that just because something doesn’t have a price tag, it should be allowed to fail.