Web 2.0 is stuck in unscalable hell
This is a disturbing trend. Although I've hoped that it would self-correct as these companies have gotten older, a LOT of Web 2.0 companies are NOT scaling well at all. In fact the reverse is true, they seem to be totally overwhelmed and underprepared in dealing with any amount of customers.
Let me rattle off a few examples:
- TypePad was down all day yesterday, and it is STILL not working properly for me. EVERYTHING SHOULD BE REDUNDANT, SIX APART!!! They lost data, even! Ugh, I need to stop thinking about this, it's still pissing me off.
- Digg's new interface sucks. Nothing works right.
- None of the Web Dashboards that I actually liked could tell me if my email passwords were secure.
- A lot of the blogs I read look terrible in Explorer, the designers obviously only looked at them in FireFox. Yeah, I still use primarily Explorer, so sue me. So does 67% of the rest of the world.
- GMail periodically goes down for hours at a time.
- Any app that makes it to the front page of Digg automatically goes down. Are they only expecting 20 or 100 customers? Do they just want to cover their DSL connection cost or something?
- UPDATED. Now WetPaint is freaking out on me and not accepting my changes. There must be a full moon or something.
- UPDATED. MySpace went completely down for quite a while, supposedly due to power outages. Guess a few million just won't stretch far enough to buy some decent generators for the old datacenter.
- UPDATED. YouTube went down.
- UPDATED. Flickr went down too.
You want to know why Web 2.0 hasn't taken off in the enterprise yet? That's why. It hasn't proven itself yet, and businesses need 99.99% uptime.
And on the security end of things, it's pretty obvious we need some kind of test or standard that we can apply to these companies to make sure our data isn't naked to the world. Especially with mashups, our data is going everywhere now. A checklist of some kind (probably something similar to my Sarbanes-Oxeley checklist) would definitely put my mind at ease. Or at least SOME kind of statement about security. I mean, is everyone else ok with putting valuable data in the hands of a complete stranger who might have been homeless on the street yesterday before being data center manager today?
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