"The Twitter Entities make no warranty and disclaim all responsibility and liability for: (i) the completeness, accuracy, availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Services or any Content; (ii) any harm to your computer system, loss of data, or other harm that results from your access to or use of the Services or any Content; (iii) the deletion of, or the failure to store or to transmit, any Content and other communications maintained by the Services; and (iv) whether the Services will meet your requirements or be available on an uninterrupted, secure, or error-free basis."
Clearly it was never meant as a reliable communications channel for any sort of M2M application where failure could result in significant economic loss or a threat to human health or life.
That just means you can't sue them. I'm sure any service can think of has a similar warning in their ToS. Did he have any reason to believe Twitter was more likely to fail than whatever alternative?
Did he have any reason to believe Twitter was more likely to fail
Whether or not Twitter is more or less reliable than any similar alternative doesn't really matter that much, especially if none of the alternatives offer anything more than best-effort service with no guarantee of reliability.
The fact that Twitter was (at least superficially) suitable for this sort of application was probably not intended by Twitter's developers, nor was the existence of the pathological corner case that ruined OP's fish tank anything more than a unfortunate coincidence.
It absolutely sucks that OP's fish died, but if Twitter explicitly disavows any sort of loss because of the possibility that their service might change or fail, it's doesn't seem reasonable to just ignore that and assume otherwise. Especially for an application where it doesn't matter if the service is up most of the time if it ends up failing during the brief period where it's needed the most. And if you are aware of the limitations of some aspect of your system, it then becomes possible to design redundancy into the other parts to compensate. I hope OP's next fishtank adventure keeps this in mind.
Exactly. And I'd add: should have he expected it to fail where he gets silently blocked but everything else works as normal?
One of the advantages of using something like Twitter is that if you're a regular user, you'll have a good idea of when it stops working altogether or is experiencing significant reliability problems. That there's a failure mode where they silently break your app but nothing else sure isn't mentioned in the TOS.
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From the Twitter terms of service:
"The Twitter Entities make no warranty and disclaim all responsibility and liability for: (i) the completeness, accuracy, availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Services or any Content; (ii) any harm to your computer system, loss of data, or other harm that results from your access to or use of the Services or any Content; (iii) the deletion of, or the failure to store or to transmit, any Content and other communications maintained by the Services; and (iv) whether the Services will meet your requirements or be available on an uninterrupted, secure, or error-free basis."
Clearly it was never meant as a reliable communications channel for any sort of M2M application where failure could result in significant economic loss or a threat to human health or life.
That just means you can't sue them. I'm sure any service can think of has a similar warning in their ToS. Did he have any reason to believe Twitter was more likely to fail than whatever alternative?
Whether or not Twitter is more or less reliable than any similar alternative doesn't really matter that much, especially if none of the alternatives offer anything more than best-effort service with no guarantee of reliability.
The fact that Twitter was (at least superficially) suitable for this sort of application was probably not intended by Twitter's developers, nor was the existence of the pathological corner case that ruined OP's fish tank anything more than a unfortunate coincidence.
It absolutely sucks that OP's fish died, but if Twitter explicitly disavows any sort of loss because of the possibility that their service might change or fail, it's doesn't seem reasonable to just ignore that and assume otherwise. Especially for an application where it doesn't matter if the service is up most of the time if it ends up failing during the brief period where it's needed the most. And if you are aware of the limitations of some aspect of your system, it then becomes possible to design redundancy into the other parts to compensate. I hope OP's next fishtank adventure keeps this in mind.
Exactly. And I'd add: should have he expected it to fail where he gets silently blocked but everything else works as normal?
One of the advantages of using something like Twitter is that if you're a regular user, you'll have a good idea of when it stops working altogether or is experiencing significant reliability problems. That there's a failure mode where they silently break your app but nothing else sure isn't mentioned in the TOS.