Twitter Fails, StumbleUpon Succeeds

Twitter fails, StumbleUpon succeeds, but just for one day.  It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.  Online, they really do go together.  The more we use digital technologies, the more we expose ourselves to the potential for failures.  It's a topic that keeps coming up amongst the bloggers at Digital.  At the same time, our web technologies are equally likely to do exactly as they should and give us a superior performance. 

Case in point. Yesterday, I was going to follow the PD Network Summit via twitter, qik (bobbygwald) and ustream without actually attending.  Although we got an invitation, my husband declined for us since we had other commitments this week.  I knew I could follow along at different random points throughout my day.

Unfortunately, I got the image above in the few slots when I was free.  While I was busy trying to find out what was wrong with my twitter feed, my @replies and my archives, I was checking links like these: Is Twitter Down?, Get Satisfaction and others (no, I did not ask FriendFeed what's wrong with twitter?).

But, while I was preoccupied and frustrated, my personal blog was getting awesome traffic that looked something like this from the back end:

Seems one of my faithful co-contributors had StumbledUpon me and it resulted in a good shot of increased traffic.  It was a nice long tail of a day.

I'm assuming each of us have had a good amount of personal technology failures and some successes.  Since talking about failures can lead to greater transparency, I'd like to ask, what's the most frustrating thing you're experiencing with online technology these days.   

And no geek speak please... real life reflections about your current techno troubles....  information overloaders, represent!

-- Cynthia Ware, The Digital Sanctuary

Comments

[ShelbyLife]

I was converting from an old google account to a new one, and switched ownership of all my docs and spreadsheets. Of course ownership switching isnt avail for spreadsheets yet. I deleted the old google account, and lost the spreadsheets.

[Matt Singley]

Quite honestly, the Twitter outage created as much technological anxiety as anything else I can remember. I get frustrated when it goes down...but then I remember that I pay absolutely nothing for the service. It's the perfect electronic crack...keep it free until we're hooked. I think dollars are going to start flying around Twitter soon, either with a)a buy-out, b)ad support, or c)paid subscription service.

I don't care which of the option it is...I'm in. So yeah...the Twitter outage is a techno trouble for me.