I got this message from Windows Messenger this evening. It's a clear and simple message that asks me to finish up any conversations as the service will be shutting down for maintenance in 5 minutes.
While the obvious ideal would be for the service to never shut down, this is a smart and simple way to handle any downtime. It would also be nice if they told me how long they would be down (although I sympathize with their tech people). This message would go a long way to preventing a zillion confused, lonely, and disgruntled users.
Good call MicroShaft.
Comments
Peter Rukavina - December 3, 2001 12:37 pm
<P>
It would be nice if ISPs would use this same technique, perhaps powered by Jabber, to alert customers of network problems. Of course it would also be nice if ISPs knew they had network problems before their customers did too. I am dreaming, I realize.
Steven Garrity - December 3, 2001 12:38 pm
Indeed. Of course, most of the problems with network service are not the kind which are scheduled in advance.
Peter Rukavina - December 3, 2001 12:39 pm
<P>
Speaking of useful services, could you try hooking this reply mechanism up to this XML-RPC-based speller app?
Steven Garrity - December 3, 2001 12:54 pm
Interesting tool. The XML-RPC spec is interesting. I think the role Dave Winer has been playing with his UserLand company in defining these specs will prove quite important.
I'm looking forward to my plan of moving aov to PHP this winter as Cold Fusion seems to be one of the least supported formats for XML-RPC apps.
As for the spelling app - it's cute. The trouble I would see with a tool like that is that you use a good standard (XML-RPC) to get the data, then you use totally non-standard (javascript, dhtml, etc.) to make the interface work in a browser.
<p>MetaFilter has a good spellchecker from SpellChecker.net. I think this is an area that where the browsers could pick up some of the slack. Word will check my spelling in my email, why not web forms? I often write replies and posts (for this site and others) in Word, then copy and paste them to the form - shouldn't robots be doing this for me?
Steven Garrity - December 3, 2001 1:03 pm
You'll have to excuse my skepticism. On closer inspection, I'm impressed with Speller's simple pulldown menu correction method (see the demo). I actually like that method better than the more complex interfaces I've seen.
vince - December 3, 2001 3:19 pm
The ISP I work for does send emails of 'planned' system outages.
We also have a <a href="http://home.cadvision.com/accounts/home/status_status.asp" target="_blank">system status</a> link on our homepage, which is pretty accurate (sometimes updated by myself even). Although, this isn't near as effective as MSN's approach, I just thought Peter would like to hear about it.
Al - December 5, 2001 7:02 am
"I'm looking forward to my plan of moving aov to PHP this winter as Cold Fusion seems to be one of the least supported formats for XML-RPC apps."
Can I borrow your cold fusion system when you are done playing with it...
Steven Garrity - December 5, 2001 10:53 am
Hey, Al, go pester blogger.
Alan - December 5, 2001 1:44 pm
What was that place to pester again?...I didn't quite hear you...