Daily Bits

Social Networks

The Story Behind Facebook’s September 23 Outage

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Facebook addicts enthusiasts were sure to have noticed the outage last night – or early morning, rather.  The downtime lasted for about two and a half hours  – the longest in four years.  While some people (like yours truly) just gave up and forgot about the social networking site for a while, others just got totally frustrated.

Naturally, the Facebook Team released a statement to provide an explanation regarding what happened.  In a note, Robert Johnson tells us this:  “The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.”

He goes on to say that the system resulted in a feedback loop that bogged down the database. In short, users couldn’t access the site.  Interestingly, the only way they could fix the situation was to shut down the site.

Think about it this way…if your computer freezes and will not respond no matter what you do, what is your course of action?  The chances are that you will simply turn the device off and then have it up and running again in a few minutes.  That’s basically what the tech guys at Facebook did.  Of course, the downtime took much longer than rebooting your computer, but that is only understandable considering the larger scale of the operations of the social network.

In any case, they had the site up in a couple of hours and we’re all enjoying the new Facebook look.  Don’t be surprised, though, if you encounter a few problems here and there in the next few days.  They’re still looking at the issue and doing a few tweaks.  What matters now is that you can go check your food in Cafe World and make sure they don’t spoil.

Getting Tired of Facebook? There’s Diaspora.

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In spite of all the complaints that people have been making about Facebook, no one can deny that it still has countless users – and it doesn’t look like the numbers are going to drop anytime soon.  If you don’t have a clear idea about the numbers, you might want to take a look at Infographic Labs’ post on how Facebook is dominating the scene.

However, just because everyone and their mother is on Facebook does not mean that everyone’s all happy and content about it.  That’s just the thing – with the numbers involved, you can’t really expect to make everyone happy.  That’s a fact of life, isn’t it?

Just in case you have serious and legitimate issues with Facebook, then you just might have an alternative pretty soon, and it’s called Diaspora.  With the tag line “The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network,” Diaspora is all about bringing together the users and the platform together.  The idea of Diaspora came up earlier this year, and it immediately received a lot of attention.  However, it wasn’t until last week that the brains behind the idea actually had something concrete to show.

On the 16th of September, the Developer Release of Diaspora was made available.  Before you get all excited and try to create an account, though, you ought to know that it’s simply for developers – people who can deal with the underlying technology.  In layman’s terms, if you are a mere user (like me), then there’s still nothing concrete to be excited about.  Still, once the ones who do know how to program work things out, we ought to have a safer alternative to Facebook.  Don’t hold your breath, though – small chance of seeing it in a “usable” format within the year.

The World of Zynga: Revenue Statistics, Demographics and Platform Analysis

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The colleagues over the Blog Herald analysed the complete Zynga platform and returned some amazing numbers in a great infographic. The startup which was only launched in 2007 is said to be making north of $1 million per day already and has not stopped growing. With more than 360 million players, Zynga has grown to become one of the major players online.
How did the platform grow this fast?

The view the complete analysis of Zynga, an infographic created by Infographiclabs, head over to The Blog Herald.

Twitter Rolls Out New Design

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Have you checked what’s trending on Twitter today?  If so, you couldn’t have possible missed one of the trending topics: #newtwitter.

What’s this #newtwitter buzz all about?  Basically, Twitter is rolling out a new design that will make things easier and more fun for those of us who communicate in 140 words or less on a regular basis.  If you visit the page dedicated to the new Twitter design, I promise you won’t be able to help it – you’ll get excited.  Take a look at the video teaser below.

So the new Twitter is going to have a viewing pane, which will allow users to see videos and photos shared in tweets without having to leave the home page.  That’s obviously handy – who likes leaving a page to see media anyway?  Another development is that users will now have links to @mentions, retweets, searches, and lists just above the timelines, providing easier access as well.

If you think about it, most of these features can be found in other applications that have access to Twitter.  That is precisely the reason why so many Twitter users, including yours truly, use these applications instead of logging in directly to the Twitter web site.  Think TweetDeck.  With the changes, people might just go back to logging in to the Twitter web site.  After watching that video, I think I shall be waiting for my account to reflect the new Twitter look. (Yup, it’s being rolled out gradually, so hold your horses if you’re not seeing any changes yet.)

Well, it IS about time that Twitter did something like this, don’t you think?

Facebook Chat: Is It Really Going to Be Better?

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We’ve all experienced it – one minute you’re chatting with a friend via Facebook chat, and the next minute, you’re cut off. Worse, you might be typing in novella detailing the funny experience you had during the day, and then having to refresh your browser because the chat window just froze and wouldn’t respond no matter what you do. Yes, no one is denying it – Facebook Chat is as buggy as stale bread full of weevils. (So why do we continue using it? Darned if I know!)

Anyway, if Rodrigo Schmidt of Facebook is to be believed, we are soon going to enjoy an uninterrupted chat experience. Right on our favorite browsers. He says:

The good news: We’ve already made progress, and we’re taking some more big steps in the coming weeks. For example, in the past couple of weeks, we’ve already made Chat faster and more stable, fixed bugs and improved the technology on which it runs.

We know you want Chat to be hassle-free and uninterrupted. In the coming weeks, we will be making important improvements in the way connections are established and messages are sent, so that Chat will be much more stable for you and your friends.

The biggest improvements come from changes that aren’t supported on older web browsers. After evaluating the alternatives, we’ve decided to make rapid improvements and provide the best Chat experience possible, which means we will no longer support Internet Explorer 6 browsers.

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t really seen any improvements in the past couple of weeks. It’s not any worse, but it’s not any better either. Still, if Facebook wants to keep their users happy, they definitely will work on this feature. In the meantime, if any of you are still using IE6 (I highly doubt it), then you have a couple of weeks to switch.

The big question remains: will this move really make Facebook Chat better for all of us (regardless of the browser being used)? You tell me.

Photo credit: Greysquare

Picplz: New iPhone App

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Apps for the iPhone are all over the place, and yet people are on the perennial quest to find a new one that they will obsess about.  For those who cannot get enough pictures and cannot wait to upload them to the Internet as soon as possible, here is a new iPhone app that will satisfy your needs easily: picplz.

This app has been around for a while, but not specifically for the iPhone.  It is developed by the founders of Imeem, the social media service that gained popularity several years ago.  In its heyday, lots of people availed of Imeem’s sharing service – videos, music, and photos.  It has been closed down, though, thanks to its acquisition by MySpace.

Anyhow, the same people behind Imeem have made picplz available for use on the iPhone.  It’s really not that revolutionary if you think about it  -it functions much like Twitter, except that it’s meant especially for photos.  Now that the iPhone has a decent camera, it is a simple matter to snap pictures and share them with your friends anytime.

You may be thinking – but there is a host of other apps that offer a similar service.  So why should anyone bother to give picplz a try?  For now, the value lies in instant uploading and tagging the location (which seems to be all the rage these days).  The founders are also working on providing more features in the future.  Besides, the app is FREE, so you really have nothing to lose by trying it out.  Oh, and this app is also available for Android phones.