As my fellow Twitterati can attest, the Twitter service seems to be going down fairly frequently as of late. If you use Twitter for a conference back channel or have come to rely on it for collaboration – this can have a big impact on your professional life.
Another free tool that aggregated as many of the online activities I’m involved in as I wish to disclose seemed like a great addition to my blog – and others were using it and saying it was great. It was, until the day it stopped working and most of my blog wouldn’t display.
Free services from private providers are often beta tests for future products. The creators and companies allow us all to be their testers in exchange for new services.
So we’re invited to use tools in ways that are meaningful to us professionally or even personally. It’s the only way to really put a service through its paces. Yet when we do that we can come to rely on the service. Then, when it can’t handle it – users are left high and dry.
So - when free services (private, non-taxpayer funded) go down, buckle under the strain of unforeseen user volume or a new facet of the service is tested and makes it all fall apart – do we have a right to complain? And do the providers have any obligation to their user base?
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If the free service is being run as a business, where advertising is sometimes displayed, and where user information is collected, the yes, users have a right to complain.
You can definitely complain, but when you talk about rights, it’s not clear what rights are being invoked. I would expect that when you look in their terms of service that you have to tick before you register that there is an out for them in relation to service provision. The concept of Web2.0 is that everything is in perpetual beta - if that’s the case, then clearly it’s not an enterprise service that can always be relied on. That is, we have to expect that sometimes it won’t work. The only way around that is to use your own services or buy a service where the supplier has a commercial obligation to provide the service. The great thing about these services is that they are free, we get to test, trial and use them. Sometimes you also have to accept that they don’t work.
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