Just did a Google News search for “Huckabee” to see if I could find the transcript from his concession speech last night, and Google News came up with this:
So, it seems once you drop out of the presidential race you also drop off Google News’s search results. I wonder if this is a funny quirk resulting from some tweaking in Google’s News database (does he have to somehow be shifted from the bucket marked “current candidates” to “past candidates” or something?). Presumably they’ll fix this soon…
Following on from my post about Wordpress being down a few days ago, Pingdom has put out some statistics on downtime for various social networks in 2008 so far:
Interesting that Yahoo! 360 does best, while Windows Live Spaces is second worst - which would be more likely to follow the other should the merger go through? Given that Microsoft’s propensity for “downtime” extends into the offline world with the frequent crashes of its desktop operating systems and software, that seems a hard trend to buck, but who knows?
As of right now, I am unable to view the Wordpress.com website (Wordpress.org is up just fine). Strangely, blogs hosted on Wordpress, with .wordpress.com addresses, are still up, at least from the look of a couple I checked.
Doesn’t downtime with major websites seem to be becoming more and more regular? Twitter has been notorious of late for its frequent outages, Amazon’s cloud-based computing servers went down last week for several hours (and see here for an unfortunate combination of the two), Flickr had a nasty outage around a month ago… So far, there seems to be no connection between all these outages, but at some point you have to wonder - is there some kind of bug going around that people haven’t cottoned onto, or is it just that traffic has become so spiky that it’s almost impossible to predict peak load anymore?
Either way, it’s a reminder of how fragile online services can still be. Although I’m not an Amazon cloud computing customer, the outages at Twitter and Flickr were bad enough that I experienced both of them as a user just by needing to use the services at times when they were unavailable. Wordpress.com is similar - I never use it since I use the hosted version on my own domain, but I wanted to set up the Akismet comment spam fighting plugin and that requires my Wordpress API key, which, of course, I can only get by going to wordpress.com…
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About me
I’m Jan Dawson, and I spend so much time reading and thinking about technology that if I didn’t have a place to let it all out I’d probably explode. Hence this blog. Go here for more about me.
All views expressed here are mine and not those of any employer or other group to which I belong.
