Email notifications are dead, long live microblogging notifications
Part of running a design studio that includes custom websites and hosting entails the requirement to keep track of a large number of processes, ranging from server performance to website visitor numbers and interaction. Traditionally, many of the tools used to monitor these processes have relied on email to send out a notification if something is wrong or simply to keep a group of people in the current loop. While this a straight forward solution, it is often cumbersome and hard data to visualize from a knowledge management perspective. After the fold we will explore how we can use recent developments in micro-blogging to overcome some of the innate obstacle presented by monitoring several aspects of server hosting and website analytics.
With the rise of Twitter and it's competitors, humans suddenly have gained the pleasure of sending small blips about their daily lives to millions of people across the world. Most fascinating about these short messages are not necessarily the contents themselves, but the way the information inside of them are categorized and distributed. Between Hashtags and an easily distributable format, the mechanisms of micro-blogging making it an ideal fit for the knowledge management aspects of our work. We have identified three requirement criteria for disseminating useful information about our metrics:
The micro-blogging standard of 140 characters per message automatically enforces the furst criteria, as any message that is broadcast, needs to confirm to that limit. In terms of access, many micro-blogging platforms go beyond the standard pull methods of RSS and ATOM feeds as well as Email, but also offer push automated messaging to Jabber Accounts like Google Talk and GMail or SMS services on your mobile phone. This way status notifications come in as they happen. Additionally, users of the same micro-blogging platform can follow consolidate the messages of the bot users on their network, as well as federate with other micro-blogging platforms. In terms of searchability, the use of hashtags and specified automatic user accounts make both trend analysis as well as time-lining a significantly easier exercise than relying on traditional logging and emailing methods.
What to see what we mean?
We installed a popular, open source, micro-blogging platform (Status.Net) on our server and will use a dummy account to track when and from where people are viewing this article. Every time someone views this article, we will also get a message on our Google Talk accounts. While this may be a trivial metric to follow, it illustrates how one can leverage this technology. For example, a store owner would probably like to know when running low on stock, and that their managers were notified through a push notification rather than a pull. All we did was to demonstrate this concept write a quick Joomla plugin that submits the masked IP address of a visitor to our micro-blog using a standard API.
To view the results please visit: http://talk.vergegraphics.com/joomla/all