Glitches in web 2.0
I bet you have noticed something as well? Some of our favourite proponents of web 2.0 are experiencing heavy problems with bust servers and abuse of their much appraised open source environments. What is happening? A sign of web 2.0's inherent weakness or just a random fluke coincidence. Lets do a quick brush up of the events which have been taken place.
First off was the famous and beloved search engine/encyclopedia Wikipedia who had to abandon its adherence to the open-source editing environment, at least in part. See article from FT. The real question here is whether it was really plausible that Wikipedia did not have to take this step at some point along the way. I still see Wikipedia as one of the strongest beacons of web 2.0 there is. However that does not mean you do not have to check your sources but in terms of getting random information fast Wikipedia is the best there is. The economic theory of network externalities help us explain this.
"A network externality arises when an addtional member conveys benefits to those already on the network" - Begg, Fisher and Dornbush chapter 14; 7th edition. This is very much the truth with Wikipedia and the nature of web 2.0 in general.
See also this article from Wired magazine on Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Apart from the Wikipedia story some of the most hailed and appraised web 2.0 services have had serious problems with providing their services.
What parts of web 2.0 are also misbehaving?
During the last weeks the pupular blogging tool/service Typepad was down to the dispair of all the subscribers. And since the Typepad service is paid for, a refund could or should be on the board for many of the subscribers. It is now up again, but for users like myself who do not have backup of the posted contents it might be time to set up a shadow blog just in case. For my part, Squarespace has luckily been behaving just fine ... for now!
Lastly, the revolutionary internet "surfing" tool del.icio.us is currently down. The reason apparently is the recent Yahoo acquisition of the popular tagging tool which have become the bread and butter of anyone who uses the internet to gather and store information. The real reason seems to be that the service simply could not handle the massive surge in new users after the news of its Yahoo affiliation.
You want to know more abou what it written above?
Well, a quick trip through the blogossphere through Technorati will yield a large enough amount of information to keep you seated at your screen until next christmas.
A lot of the information above is taken from this post at Betaflow.com. For specific news on the del.icio.us situation you should go visit this official del.icio.us blog.