Eggs in a basket: Lessons on reliance

Twitter was down for few days. The micro-blogging soothsayers had nowhere else to go but wait for the service to come back online. However, twitter is simply a service (and prone to failures).. for now, inspite of the numerous times it keeps throwing the cute error messages, people are willing to forgive the outages.

eggs in a basket my observation to this episode is if the whole “micro-blogging” ecosystem could go down based on a service, aren’t we putting all our eggs in one basket? if micro-blogging has to go main stream, can one only rely on a single service to deliver the same? Where are the alternatives? oh yeah, u might start thinking of 3jam, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Jooopz, Jyngle, Loopnote, tumblr, plazes, Pinger, pownce and Swarm-it but none really have achieved the status or ubiquity that twitter has..

the other reason why this is more important for social media is that all of these services are online. and online services are prone to disruption more than any other thing (self inflicted or malaise oriented)..

another example of eggs in a basket is the “Google Adsense”.. google made a whole lot of us greedy and a few dollars with the adsense program. of course, you have to give them credit for spawning a new “professional blogger” SMI category. yeah there are other money earning programs but none as ubiquitous as adsense.. what happens when adsense goes down?

currently, i am feeling the pain as adsense has stopped working for my blog and i have no clue why? UPDATE: Adsense never actually stopped working for me. Instead a plugin (IE7Pro) that i installed on my browser stopped all ads from displaying.

what if google decides that i am not fit for their ad network? fortunately, my daily bread doesn’t depend on this but what if it did? what if not earning for a few days was NOT an option?

in the recent BlogCamp, a participant mentioned google turning off his gmail account when he wrote a mail to their CEO complaining of the ill treatment he had received from one of the google recruiters. what could he do except watch in pain?

in some cases identities of people have been wiped out when google decided to erase their site from the index.

the age old maxim of diversification is becoming more relevant for a Web 2.0 world. sure the reliability of the services have improved tremendously but what if it failed ever? would we be willing to take that risk?

What do you think one should do to tackle this?

Technorati tags: , ,

Comments

Anonymous said…
"However, twitter is simply a service (and prone to failures)/"
You should say "prone to heck of a lot of failures".
June 5, 2008 at 12:48:00 AM GMT+5:30
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Community Star Discussions and Future

In my continuing discussion with Community Stars across the country, I had a discussion today with Sadashiv. Though he works out of chennai and was here for a short trip, he found time today to discuss the opportunities for Community Star program to improve on. Some of thoughts we generated out of the discussion are as follows: 1. Community Stars are disengaged 'cause of lack of communication with them from MS. Better communication channels need to be developed. 2. Award experience and delivery of the Community Star benefits leave a lot to be desired. 3. Community Stars feel that MS is not laying enough importance on Community Stars and do not value their contributions much. More information needs to flow to CSs. From our end, we are doing the following: 1. Launch an extranet portal exclusively for Community Stars. We will host issue submission on this site. Also, we will share opportunities via this site e.g. beta opportunities 2. Re-launch the Community Star distributi
Read more

Making Vista Search your PST Files

Vista can index a lot of files and for some reason it doesn’t index the MS Outlook files.. maybe it is as Outlook is already doing the same.. in case you still want to search PST from Vista Search here is what you can do: Go to the Control Panel Choose "Indexing Options" Click on the "Advanced" button Click on the "File Types" tab Check the checkbox next to "PST" to include it in the search Select the bullet next to the option "Index Properties and File Contents" Click OK and OK again on the message that appears. This is especially useful for information workers like me who have large PST files and are forced to archive from time to time … indexing the archives would return the information from these forgotten folders as well :) Tip taken from On10.net Technorati tags: Outlook , PST , search
Read more

Technocratical Society

In the past days, I haven’t been blogging. A lot has happened in that time – terrorist attack in Mumbai, MNS lost track, global recession set in and Congress advanced in the country. Here’s an ode to the state of the society as viewed by my nephew, Shantanu Chandra who is in Class XII, Amity International, Gurgaon. The lines below capture the times prevailing and the need for us to drop the “chalta hai” attitude but with caution: This techie world of gizmo and gadget This eerie feeling of incongruous widget Which gives us pleasure and takes pain Along with it makes us insane; Absurdness to such a horizon from where one would never fall And still people call you “Microsoft—…That’s all” A teen like me can’t do without a mobile-call Even though I know it is killing my brain cells, after all; This techie world of gizmo and gadget Makes a non-techie guy weird and hollow The bureaucrat are more concerned about their Sunday meal Than to serve the poor people whose w
Read more