News flash: Web 2.0 is unreliable

In the blogosphere of early and ardent technology adopters, sites like Twitter and Seesmic have justifiably gained the attention and buzz. Twitter has had a series of well documented outages, and this weekend Seesmic seized up when videos of movie celebrities, such Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford, were posted to the video sharing site.

It also caused problems at partner sites, like TechCrunch, that embed Seesmic video comments (vomments) on their pages.

These recurring problems once again demonstrate that the much loved Web 2.0, consisting of many start-ups lacking adequate infrastructure and stable code, is unreliable. The larger start-ups and established sites have the funding to deal with traffic spikes, but they are not invulnerable to outages. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and others have delivered blank pages. I grappled with some brief outages caused by server overloads as we were testing new pages on my own site recently.

All the unreliability and hiccups simply proves that Web 2.0 is like Swiss cheese, full of holes that lead to 404s. It's growing pains that these fledgling companies will survive if they can continue to innovate, attract more users, and increase uptime.

As the user base grows for these start-ups, there will be proportionally increased outrage associated with downtime, even if they are free services. That's why Facebook borrowed $100 million recently to provide funding to expand its server farms and associated infrastructure.

In his blog, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur said the company has had 99.99 uptime until the recent problems. The downtime was exacerbated by a lack of communication with users by Seesmic, which the company plans to address.

Following is a Seesmic video I did on the issue:

See also: A business model for Twitter: Pay up

[onlyauser]

What isn't unreliable in the beginning?

I remember a day early in my career at an advertising agency when I made the statement that in a short time all advertising materials would be created on a computer. Everyone burst out in loud laughter, and were make comment how far off I was. Of course I got the last laugh. Everything indeed changed within the next five years.

Babies all stumble around before they walk. Technology such as Web 2.0 is no different.

[The_Decider]

There is NO web 2.0 "technology".

It is a meaningless marketing term and buzzword to fool the unsuspecting into thinking it is something new.

[The_Decider]

There is NO such "technology" called Web 2.0.

It is a meaningless term used by the parasites in advertising to fool people into thinking it is something new.

BS terms like blog and its annoying derivatives are an example are as website like twitter. What is going on behind the scenes is not really different. Whether it is a truly useful framework like rails, or a cool miz of the old like AJAX, it is nothing new.

[The_Decider]

I wish CNET would have actually tested the crappy talkback changes before foisting it on the public. I guess since they only hire psuedo-jounalists, they had to hire psuedo-developers. If driving away talkback traffic was their goal, they succeeded.

[dfarber]

Agreed...growing pains...

[The_Decider]

News Flash: Web 2.0 is a meaningless marketing term.

It is embarrassing that writers at a supposedly technical new site do not understand this.

[Markus2008]

And your point is? Every company I have worked for that has internal servers have had significant downtime. And companies that have outsourced IT staff wait hours or days for a fix. Anything man made will break.

[Dango517]

Sound like a horse race and Web 1.0 and 2.0 are neck and neck.

[kewldude2008]

Web 2.0 based on Client Server Technology has a bleak future primarily because on the need to keep on adding server farms as the number of users increase. This is a cost intensive and wasteful exercise. Instead if the power of distributed computing using secured P2P is utilized, this could solve many of the problems present web2.0 is facing. A company based in mumbai has developed this technology and is presently developing a p2p browser that will enable this kind of technology.

Called netalter this technology has received the patent in India and application is under scrutiny in the US.

[CliqueStudios]

Whether you call it Web 2.0 or not, there is definitely a place for both Web 2.0 applications and Enterprise applications to coexist in the market. Web 2.0 is expected to not be 100% reliable as it's delivered through a medium that the market has grown to expect inconsistent performance, the internet. For the general public, outages are acceptable and the successful companies will beef up their infrastructure as they grow. Businesses however should not base their IT applications model around web 2.0 that have not undergone these growth pains yet. In fact, I would argue that web 2.0 applications have no place in a business IT environment. And if they do, they better join the rest of us in our expectations that their web 2.0 app may have outages and have a decent business continuity plan in place!

[dcassine]

Well this article is lacking some backing. There is nothing on the article that points to a WEB 2.0 problems. As a matter of fact many WEB 1.0 companies go down once in a while, so stating that web 2.0 has problems because providers had problems is a misleading statement. Also the article does not point out what web 2.0 features caused the problem. The only fact is that two start ups had growing pains.

As to the video attached to the blog, it did not add any content to the blog at all. It was the writer reading his own post.

My opinion on the article is that was a BIG title and no content backing the title at all. BUUUU!!!

[Tony McCune]

Web 2.0 apps have often been built on simple scripting technologies that get code built quickly but don't scale well. Web scaling is a tricky business that's not well understood by many Web developers. We've to invest months of time building scale into our Java application, something that investors often don't understand the urgency of. Our saving grace at http://www.digitachalk.com is Amazon Web Services cloud computing that's let us build out without spending a fortune.

[pocket5s]

Obviously the author has no idea what "web 2.0" is. It isn't a technology, but a concept.