The trouble with Web 2.0
Yesterday morning, web users around the world went to log in to their Ma.gnolia accounts -- an online bookmarking service like Delicious -- only to find that the website had been taken offline. And it wasn't just temporarily dead; a notice (which is still up) had been put in place indicating that the problem was worse than a simple bum router. Data had been corrupted and lost, probably for good. That means that any bookmarks you stored on the service are very likely gone forever if you didn't keep a local backup, which I imagine very few users did.
Such issues are far from rare, and in fact they seem to be becoming more common as Web 2.0 services, designed to replace what we do offline with web-based counterparts, become more and more popular.
Earlier this month, Salesforce.com abruptly went dark, locking out nearly a million paying customers from its web-based CRM tool. Numerous companies use Salesforce.com as a vital tool for managing sales calls and the selling process, so even a relatively short outage (this one was about an hour) can cost a company's sales operation thousands of dollars or more.
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