Does Social Media Site Reliability Matter?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on June 6th, 2008 12:35 PMOver the past few weeks there has been a pretty consistent trend of conversation in the blogosphere surrounding site downtime. One meme that frequently reoccurs is that “Twitter is Down.” Just last night Mike Arrington posted an error message from Twitter which said “We just lost a database about 5 minutes ago and this has severely impacted the site.” That doesn’t sound like to big of an error, right?
This morning when I woke up, the first site I checked out was Plurk. I might be a Plurk addict now but when I loaded the site, it wasn’t functioning properly. I couldn’t update my status and eventually I was prompted with the following error:
I was a little shocked that only 2 days after I started using the service, it was already having scaling issues. Twitter regularly has issues and back when MySpace became popular it was also down every few hours. If you provide a free and useful service, I’m beginning to think that reliability is not as important. While people become frustrated, with not having access to a site, they will still come back later and try again.
According to Compete.com, Twitter saw continued growth last month despite their substantial downtime. So do you think social media site downtime really matters or is it just a bunch of loud people complaining about nothing?
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i think both - i think to some, it matters and to others, they're just making a lot of noise. i've found that people who suffer from chronic feelings of entitlement complain the loudest. but people who appreciate a service get bummed about downtime but don't let it affect their loyalties. when i'm happy with a site, i come back in spite of the downtime. but i also complain a little bit. ;]
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Ok, that was useless information, but I'd say people don't really mind errors, because more often than not they come back within minutes. I think people understand that it's free, and that nothing can really be done on their part to fix it. It's just something that you come to expect when you use the Internet; people know that eventually there are going to be problems, and though they're slightly annoyed, it doesn't affect their "loyalty."
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It is becoming our way of banding like brothers in a knowledge of system failures. For a tribe (twitter) to survive, we must (a) have the group established with desire to grow, and (b) develop emotional attachments. In a group desire to make this thing work, we suffer the growing pains together and in doing so, establish our place within the platform as well as within the group.
So yes, maybe we are loud. But I'd rather read someones witty rant about the system being down that about what soup to reheat for lunch.
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