After my post earlier today about web app outages and issues, here are some “explanations” and further reading:
As I’m writing this, I’m having major issues with Twitter and twhirl (desktop client for twitter) updating properly……………….sigh.
Here is some info about Twitter’s wackiness on Wednesday night:
Sue Water’s post about her Twitter account being hijacked
The Twitter blog’s post on the “outage” - comments most interesting here!
A video by Jeremy Banks of what happened in his twitter account during that time - http://s3.jeremybanks.ca/crazytwitter.mov
I can’t kick the Twitter habit, though, so am sticking with it - the value has thusfar outweighed any problems caused personally.
After an outage for most of the day, Edublogs is obviously up and running again! I still love and support the service, but am extremely glad I wasn’t doing a workshop on this today. I fully support Edublogs, as shown by my supporter status, and think James Farmer has been getting slammed unnecessarily for some of his recent changes to the platform. I can’t imagine attempting to do what he does. Many educators have been given an excellent service to help bring blogging into their classrooms. Outages like today’s though, make actually USING these blogs rather difficult. That being said, here is Mike Bogle’s post “Edublogs.org Plagued by Outage”
The banner in the Edublogs dashboard currently reads:
“Apologies! - We’d like to apologise for the downtime today, a bug between the new forums features and caching caused quite a few blogs to time-out but we’ve fixed that now.”
UPDATE
James Farmer immediately commented on this post apologizing for the outage (see comments). Here is our email exchange following the comment. Thanks James!
ME:
James -
Thanks for your incredibly quick response! I in no way mean to bash you OR edublogs - I’m one of your biggest supporters. I couldn’t ignore the outage, however. Thanks for the credits and I look forward to all the new features you’re offering - great stuff!
James:
No stress at all, we are genuinely sorry (our safety net failed us so
we’re adding another one) and we totally appreciate you being frank
and talking about the service…. we’ve gotta take the rough with the
smooth :)
Cheers, James
Now, this outage/issue didn’t personally affect me, but I witnessed major upset on Twitter following the deletion of an excellent Voicethread created by Alec Couros. The VT was contributed to by many prominent people in the edtech world and it mysteriously disappeared. Alec was forced to send out a cry for people to help re-create the VT, which they very graciously did. The project is excellent - you can view/listen to it here: What Does the Network Mean to You? I asked Alec on Twitter if he ever got a decent reply from VoiceThread to explain what happened to the original project. Here is his response:
courosa @kolson29 IM deleted the email, all VT help said was that they were experiencing problems, was rare, and perhaps due to a “network burp”.
Yet again, I’m not slamming Voicethread - it’s one of the coolest tools out there right now. The loss of Alec’s project and subsequent response by VT does bother me, though.
Now, with all of this, is my enthusiasm for technology dampered? No, but I am struggling with how to explain the unpredictable nature to teachers new to web apps and technology. If you are required to do 3x the work (as described by one comment in my earlier post) when presenting and teaching with newer technology, many teachers will be skeptical of the value. I attempt to preface all technology classes and workshops with the disclaimer that technology is unpredictable and we just have to be patient and have multiple plans, but this makes it a tougher sell for some. I’m not going to change my way of teaching and learning, but the glitches and blips make it that much harder to convince the masses that technology should be mandatory in every classroom.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Kate,
The outage was confined to a selection of blogs and probably lasted between 4-6 hours… still not good though but we’ve taken steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
We’ve also sent you come credits to say thanks for your patience.
Cheers, James
It’s a good lesson to learn, this was the first time it has happened ever to me since I have been using Web 2.0. But really, we put a lot of faith in these companies, and into many Beta versions. These things will happen, and we always have to consider “What would happen if X went down?” (X=Flickr,Wikispaces,Blip,PBWiki,etc.) Now some of these have strong backing (Google, Yahoo!), but we should be concerned with almost anything we use.
On the other hand, I am more likely to lost “my stuff” on my own hard drive in some cases.
Thanks for the interesting post!
A network burp?
Sounds like a good name for a band.
:)
Kevin
Hi Kate,
Your post on the topic of relying on web services that are often themselves dependent on a third party networks and infrastructure is a really valuable conversation to have, and everyone who uses a web-service should seriously consider, and make plans for, how they will cope when the service they rely on is not available for a time. Because if Google, Amazon, and Skype can go down, who can’t? But even if you dismiss the features that are only possible in a network setting(like simply collecting voices from all over the world) the web services will in the end, win out in overall reliability over their desktop counterparts. I know I’m a little bit biased;) but just as Alec points out, the vast majority of content that’s lost everday happens on the PCs, not at a datacenter like ours, http://www.hostedsolutions.com/data-center/facilities-specs.php The truth is we will make mistakes, sometimes our partners will fall short, sometimes Murphy perfect storm will strike(it did to us last week) but in the end your desktop pc cannot compete with our infrastructure, our back-up plans, and our paranoid, persnickety, and brilliant Systems Administrator. We lose sleep over the one in a million chance of losing user content.
ﾠﾠSo while I think the conversation you fostered is an excellent one, and should really be continued I do need to make a couple of corrections. A VoiceThread wasn’t ‘lost’ it was deleted by the user, I’m sure by accident. The e-mail I received stated that it “was accidentally deleted from my account. Is there any way to retrieve this???” Here was my answer, which does not include any references to ‘burps’ ;)
“Hello,
I’m sorry, right now there is no way to retrieve a VoiceThread that has been deleted. We’re going to develop a method for placing them in a ‘garbage can’ of some kind but it’s a very tricky problem because a Thread contains other users commentary as well as your own. Apologies for the loss, I know this can be depressing, we’re about to announce a way to download archival versions of a VoiceThread that can be saved on your hard drive.
Thanks and sorry about the loss of the Thread,”
I don’t want to sound defensive because whether we like it or not we are susceptible to service interruptions, but losing our user’s content is another story. Losing a voicethread has never happened to us, and I would rather shut the service down for a month than risk one of our users losing a voice comment from their grandmother on some old family photo. Losing our user’s content is the absolute worst thing that could happen.
Again, I think the topic of service reliability is an excellent one, and I don’t claim to be better than anyone else, but people should know the correct details, and how strongly we feel about protecting their content.
Thanks,
ﾠ
-Steve Muth
Our wiki went down when we needed it most. Last year, it would have been a catastrophe. This year, I have other things we can do. Since they work collaboratively on a lot, we can shift gears. When a kids wiki page disappears (generally user error), we learn to step back and think and how to solve problems.
Now, our server going down is another issue. That has happened more than freaky web happenings. That stops a lot more.
Do you think resilience is a trait we learn using the technologies?
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