Web 2.0 needs a bit of Business 1.0
Last night, when I tried to upload and view my new King’s Cross photos with Flickr, I found it was having very nasty problems. Most of my images appeared broken; most of others’ appeared broken, too. I began to wonder if all my photos had been wiped from one of their drives. Browsing the help forum didn’t reveal anything — they seemed unaware of any problems.
Today Bloglines unexpectedly asked me to log in — it should remember me between visits. When I entered my password it said something suggesting I’d got it wrong. When I asked for a password reminder it said it didn’t recognise my e-mail address. Its news page reported a database incident three days ago, but nothing more recent. Returning just a few minutes ago I see a picture of large, comical plumber shrugging his shoulders helplessly (or is someone threatening him with a gun?). The message alongside says “Hi, I’m the Bloglines Plumber. We’ve had a database problem [...]“.
Now it’s fair to say you gets what you pay for. But at the same time a business has to meet expectations if it’s going to survive — and Bloglines and Flickr are both businesses. While Web 2.0 is a new and exciting era of community interactivity emerging from the gloom of the dot.com crash of 2001, let’s not forget that Business 1.0 has lasted a very long time for very good reasons. Boring things like cashflow, corporate communication, and planning exist because they help a business survive and grow.
Since starting this article I’ve just discover the coroporate Flickr blog. There’s a recent entry there headed “Sometimes We Suck”. Among other things it says “we were, at more than one point, really bad at keeping up with your reports, responding to them, and staying in communication about stuff that wasn’t working, stuff that was being worked on, and all of that”.
The Register earlier this year covered another Flickr outage, which Flickr then described as follows:
The Flickr database is at the spa. Treatment includes a full-body exfoliation scrub, followed by an avocado cleansing mask and finishes with an invigorating steam bath. We’ll be back as soon as we can!
To trust your family album to the internet requires more than a funky UI and a bit of New Age press coverage. The system must be durable, reliable, and as a user, you must have a guarantee that you’ll be able to retrieve them in forty or sixty years time: just as the shoebox of family photos under the bed. In other words digital must prove itself to be permanent. [...] The best engineers, David Rosenthal reminded us recently, are pessimistic. They imagine the worst that can happen, and prepare for it. They don’t spent the day dreaming up amusing analogies for a hard disc failure.
Or indeed Photoshopping amusing plumber images.
