Two Features Every Gmail User Must Utilize

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)


Reading Search Engine Journal Loren Baker's Gmail horror story brought back my Gmail nightmare.

Way back in 2005, I tried logging into Gmail as usual. But Gmail kept redirecting me to this odd error screen with the message: "Sorry... account maintenance underway" and would not let me sign in. (Above image taken from my 2005 Japanese blog.)

After trying (and failing to log in) for two full days, I contacted gmail-maintenance@google.com, and even posted in Google Groups, but did not receive a resolution or even a response. I tried logging in twice a day, everyday, for four months, and finally my persistence paid off. Out of the blue my access had been restored and I haven't had problems since. But to this day, I still have no idea how or why my account was under maintenance -- for four months.

• Yes, I know GMail is free.
  
• Yes, I know GMail is still in beta.
• Yes, I am aware I should not be complaining... but it's... Google.

Even if it's free and in beta, Google isn't supposed to... break. As embarrassed as I am to admit this, I quickly got over the trauma, and continue to use Gmail. But when Google nightmare stories catch my eye, it brings me back to 2005, and the panic of when I couldn't access my e-mail, compelling me to go out of my way and remind my friends the same thing could happen to them.

Fortunately, Gmail has two great backup features that takes only a few seconds to set-up. My peers were extremely thankful I shared, so hopefully they'll help you too. :)

Two Features Every Gmail user should have enabled:

E-mail forwarding.

I created a backup e-mail account for my main e-mail, and have a copy of everything sent to my inbox to my backup. To set this up:

1. Create a back up e-mail (ie: mye-mailaddress.backup@gmail.com).
2. Settings
3. Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> Forwarding -> Foward a copy of incoming mail to "mye-mailaddress.backup@gmail.com" -- or whatever your backup e-mail address is.

Gmail's "Send mail as:"

Gmail enables adding custom 'From' addresses for free. learn more here.
So in case my main e-mail is disabled for one reason or another, I can always send e-mail as my e-mail address from my backup. For free. Pretty neat.

With the above, I have some peace of mind, though I truly hope I will never ever get locked out of my account again. Bonus: check out techradar.com's "40 Brilliant Gmail hints, hacks, and secrets" it may have some more useful tips.

Have any of the nightmare Gmail stories happened to you? Is Gmail your primary e-mail address? Do you have any preventative tips or tricks I don't know?

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

GMail and Apple's MobileMe Holding an Outage Contest

Apple's replacement for .Mac, MobileMe, has been roundly mocked for its spotty uptime since rollout last month, drawing the company's CEO, Steve Jobs to apologize for the lack of quality in an internal memo. But even following an internal reorganization and the public thrashing, users, including me, were unable to access their e-mail for a good portion of the afternoon - even as the company's MobileMe Status page shows no updates since the end of July.

Not to be outdone, the most popularly cited alternative to MobileMe, Google's GMail, has also suffered outages this afternoon, locking its many users out of their e-mail, again, including me.


At the beginning of the issues with MobileMe Mail, Apple famously said the outages were only impacting a small 1 percent of users, despite widespread complaints throughout the Web. Today's outage, which Apple reported lasted about a half hour, cited only that "MobileMe members were unable to access MobileMe mail", so that indicates a full outage.

GMail, on the other hand, says, "We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors," without going into detail as to how widespread the issues are. GMail even goes the extra mile to promise "your account data and messages are safe." A discussion sparked by Shey Smith on FriendFeed shows the outages don't appear to have hit everyone.


The 1-2 punch of the outages has made discussion of the downtime the top conversation starters on Twitter, even higher than the Beijing Olympics or the Russia/Georgia skirmish. People must really hate having their e-mail interrupted!

TweetStats Shows Impact of Instability on Top Tweeters' Activity

Much of the impact of Twitter's frequent downtime has been anecdotal. Amid some saying they're leaving the service for greener pastures, or developers pulling up their stakes in the Twitter community, statistics show that some of Twitter's most prominent and active users have dramatically reduced their activity on the site over the last two months.

The drop in total tweets by virtually every top user who was measured could be part technical - due to their simply being unable to login, or psychological, a result of lower activity and lower conversations which became a self-fulfilling prophecy. While none abandoned the site altogether, what could have been an "up and to the right" activity graph has largely stalled, and in many cases, reversed.


My own activity, rising month by month after I finally started using the service in January, stalled in June, and is still well below what it likely would have been had stability not been impacted.

Using TweetStats, a site which can show your total tweeting activity, who you most frequently message, and which hours and days you use the service, I polled ten top Tweeters to see how their June and July activity compared with April and May. Here's what I found:



Chris Brogan / @chrisbrogan
April and May Tweets: 2,896
June and July Tweets: 1,070
Change in Tweeting: Down 63%


Corvida Raven / @corvida
April and May Tweets: 2,669
June and July Tweets: 1,065
Change in Tweeting: Down 60%


Danny Sullivan / @dannysullivan
April and May Tweets: 1,281
June and July Tweets: 551
Change in Tweeting: Down 57%


Dave Winer / @davewiner
April and May Tweets: 1,535
June and July Tweets: 527
Change in Tweeting: Down 66%


Drew Olanoff / @drewolanoff
April and May Tweets: 2,131
June and July Tweets: 909
Change in Tweeting: Down 57%


GeekMommy / @geekmommy
April and May Tweets: 6,030
June and July Tweets: 1,419
Change in Tweeting: Down 76%


Jason Calacanis / @jasoncalacanis
April and May Tweets: 1,017
June and July Tweets: 562
Change in Tweeting: Down 45%


Leo Laporte / @leolaporte
April and May Tweets: 363
June and July Tweets: 237
Change in Tweeting: Down 35%


Robert Scoble / @scobleizer
April and May Tweets: 3,579
June and July Tweets: 746
Change in Tweeting: Down 79%


Michael Arrington / @techcrunch
April and May Tweets: 1,587
June and July Tweets: 1,079
Change in Tweeting: Down 32%

Across the board, Twitter's issues cut activity to the site by about half or more for some of the most visible users of the site. Others, like Kevin Rose of Digg (TweetStats) and Pete Cashmore of Mashable (TweetStats) saw only a less than 20 percent reduction in their Twittering activity between the two time periods. While there's no doubt many people, like Steve Rubel and Allen Stern, wish discussion of Twitter's problems would just go away, the impact it had on the site over the lsat few months has been very real, and we're just now able to take a step back and measure its impact.

Twitter Finding New and More Creative Ways to Fail

Just when you thought it was safe to Tweet again, Twitter ran into yet another database problem, which not only resulted in sporadic "Fail Whale" sightings, but dramatically impacted the roster of those following one's updates, as well as those each of us were subscribed to. The latest snafu comes at a time when the growing number of microblogging addicts are seeking alternatives, moving to FriendFeed, Plurk, and increasingly, Identi.ca.

According to a post on the Twitter Status blog, the issue first showed a reduced number of followers on the service, and later, in order to solve the issue, Twitter went into a maintenance mode, warning of lower counts across the board. Amusingly, they claimed that some of the lower counts could be due to the removal of spammers, but in my experience, it's been more than 9 hours since the problem was first identified, and I've seen the number of people I'm following drastically cut, from more than 1,500, down to "only" 672, less than half.


On Monday, when I said "The Talk About Rules for Social Following Is Getting Out of Hand", I had taken a screenshot of my current Twitter ratio, at 1,534 to 1,441, after having worked for a good part of the previous week with Twitter Karma to get my ratio synchronized. Just a few days later, that data is carved to 672 and 1,236, prompting some to try and refollow me, and even more to flock to identi.ca.

Twitter's gotten a lot of abuse on this blog in the past few weeks, as we've gone over issues with developers, uptime and changes to the API, but every time I think they've captured the market on a single route to failure, they find another way.

The team's employees are talking a good game about getting this resolved, but seriously, Twitter, why should we believe you now?

See also:

Why Does Everything Suck: The Nightmare Twitter Scenario May Be Upon Us
Profy: So You Thought Nothing Could Be Worse Than Fail Whale? Now Get Your Followers Back

TweetMeme Returns Following Months-Long Twitter-Forced Outage

The on again off again cold war that Twitter has been having with its development community has been the subject of much discussion over the last few weeks, especially with the news of reduced unauthenticated API calls, and the new integration of Gnip. But even as Twitter is appearing to get its footing, significant damage has already been done to many services that relied on the microblogging service to survive. One of those was the popular link tracker, TweetMeme, which returned to the Web over the weekend, after months of the service being unavailable, not thanks to developers' neglect, but Twitter's restrictions.

TweetMeme launched in January, gaining significant coverage in the blogosphere, including an article in TechCrunch, who gushed, "The killer Twitter-tracker just arrived and its name is Tweetmeme". But by May, Twitter, under incredible pressure, started disabling developers' access to Jabber and XMPP services, which knocked the service off the Web.

See: Tweetmeme Down Due to Twitter Jabber Problems

At the time, the downtime was expected to only last days, but it turned out to be months.

Service founder Nick Halstead, also the author of Fav.or.it, wrote in a comment on this blog Friday, "Our side project http://www.tweetmeme.com which was the first twitter URL tracker has now been down for months because we were offered the use of the XMPP feed and by the time we had implemented they pulled it. We will not bring it back up again or put development effort into it unless these kind of restrictions are a thing of the past."

The XMPP firehose has famously been limited to only four partners - FriendFeed, Zappos, TwitterVision and Summize, plus Gnip this last week. And Tweetmeme couldn't play on the uneven field, shutting down. But as of yesterday, Halstead reported his team had a work-around, essentially piggy-backing on the search capabilities of Summize itself, now owned by Twitter. (Confused yet?)



Tweetmeme is back in operation now, aiming to show the most popular shared links on Twitter, highlighting the biggest stories on their front page, like Techmeme does, and showing them in order of appearance on the Tweetmeme river, just as Techmeme's river does.

Now that Tweetmeme is back in action, the questions remain - will traffic return, remembering the site's out there, and can it deliver relevant results worth following, as Techmeme has proven it can? And will following Summize's lead be good enough, or will Twitter change the rules again? Hard to know, given the microblogging giant's inconsistencies. That's why many developers are bailing on Twitter altogether.

twitAbit Debuts as New Service to Escape Twitter Downtime

Many Twitter users have a love/hate relationship with the service. They love what it does, helping people communicate in real time, from the Web or their mobile phones, but they hate that it hasn't scaled to meet demand. In its place, a new crop of services is rising to work around the downtime. The latest, debuting today, is called twitAbit, which leverages store and forward capabilities to ensure that Twitter fail doesn't ensure your own fail.

The Twitter "fail whale" is well known and a great number of users are looking for a way out. Some have left Twitter. Some are just using it less. Others have moved on, to Plurk, to FriendFeed, or Pownce. But leaving Twitter comes at a high cost for those who have invested time in building relationships, and in some cases, thousands of followers. Even despite the many outages, the vast majority of Twitter's user base has largely stuck it out, hoping for better times.


But if those better times don't come right away, twitAbit is prepared. The service offers a simple form, asking for your user name and password, what you are doing, and a link. It appears to be a project of betaworks, and was announced on the switchAbit Web site, which RSS and blogging guru Dave Winer announced back in May.

At the time of posting, Winer promised Flickr to Twitter functionality, and a second Twitter application, most likely twitAbit, Although it's not 100% clear, he has spoken of a need for a decentralized Twitter, and this could be the first step.

Also: You can see Winer's first "tweet" from twitAbit back on June 13th.

Google Blogger FTP Publishing: Out for 12+ Hours

I hadn't planned on making my blog a sounding board for all products that have had significant downtime, but this one has certainly hit close to home.

Starting yesterday evening, around 8 p.m., I have been completely unable to add new posts to the site, making it appear that I am asleep at the wheel. The culprit? An issue with Google's Blogger service, which has blocked the ability to post via FTP.

This is not the first time Google's Blogger has had a outage of significant length here, and also, not the first time they have completely ignored a throe of user complaints and support requests on their site.

At a time when Wordpress and other platforms are gaining significant momentum, and can tout "5 minute" upgrades, the temptation to move, assuming the site structure and comments are retained, is extremely high.

I'd have thought Google's acquisition of Blogger via Pyra Labs would have provided the team with significant experience in growing a scalable, trouble-free infrastructure, but from conversations I've had with people close to the team, it seems that the most infrastructure-focused employees at Blogger had stars in their eyes around Google's other products, and Blogger has suffered from neglect.

Something is Broken indeed.

Update: Finally acknowledged on Blogger Status and FTP is starting to flow. But this is ... bad.

See Also:

Google Blogger: Something is Broken!
http://tinyurl.com/5sejhy

Thomas Hawk Cites Blogger Outage on FriendFeed
http://tinyurl.com/3p96y8

From August 9, 2007:
Google Ignores Users During Major Blogger Outage
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2007/08/google-ignores-users-during-major.html

SiteMeter Stats Sputter to a Stop, With No Reason Given

It seems that outages are the new black.

After a weekend filled with stories on Amazon downtime, a brief Disqus blip, continued Twitter troubles, and many sites straining to take on increased crowds swelling to catch the latest from WWDC, I was surprised to see my blog statistics engine, SiteMeter, get in on the act. Since 11 this morning Pacific time, data has been almost completely stalled, not logging visits, and the company's blog doesn't give any reason for the slowness.

I'd like to blame Scoble, or blame Steve Jobs, but I don't think they're the cause.


SiteMeter is one of the most widely used statistics trackers in the blogosphere. And while I could put up with occasional outages from a free product (See: Mark Evans: The Wonderful World of Web 2.0 Whining), I'm one of those who wanted to support the site's developers, paying $89 a year to gain a premium version of the service last year, which gave me expanded access to a wider array of reports.

I'd like to say I don't check with SiteMeter throughout the day out of curiosity, but I'd be lying to you for sure. I love stats. I even made a dashboard widget for Mac OS X that shows me the day's activity, letting me just drag my mouse to the bottom right corner to get caught up. Except, today, I was surprised to see I was extremely unpopular. Not only was the total visit count much lower than I had anticipated, but it said absolutely nobody had checked in in the last hour. And since this morning, I've seen no updates at all.

SiteMeter's seen issues like this in the past. They operate not from one mega-database, but instead, each of its individual servers runs on its own database. When one has a hiccup, only those users on that single server show issues. I expect that's likely what's going on here, and just maybe, with luck, the total statistics will catch up overnight.

Now, we'll see just how much my going dark for about 36 hours over the weekend will have hurt me. With the company's blog not giving any hints as to what's happening, hope is all I have. Maybe it's time to check in with my FTP server and download my logs.

louisgray.com Experiences 100% Uptime During WWDC Keynote

Today, many of the popular sites aimed to deliver minute-by-minute updates to Apple CEO Steve Jobs' keynote, as well as some social networking sites extremely popular among the technology elite, slowed to a crawl under the rush of traffic from Mac and iPhone fans hoping to get a glimpse of Cupertino's latest products. Sites as diverse as TechCrunch to Twitter buckled under the pressure, while others, like MacRumors Live, Engadget and FriendFeed, maintained stability, gaining praise.

I am happy to report that louisgray.com enjoyed 100% uptime during this rush. Here's how we pulled off the enviable feat, all without removing services, reducing features, or requiring the offloading of some traffic to partners:

1. I Posted Absolutely Nothing At All

After much advance study, I realized that one of the major issues behind some of these sites who ran into trouble was in their offering of interesting content. Whether through rumors of new products in advance of the conference, live feeds during the conference, or reaction to the conference's announcements, each of the sites had attracted a population of users disproportionate to the norm, resulting in traffic spikes well above average, invariably causing slower access times or even downtime.

To avoid such a fate, not only did I not promise anything, but I didn't post anything, not just the morning of the keynote, but in the preceding 24 hours, essentially throwing potential visitors off the scent. I believe that this strategy, delivering an overall reduction, both day over day and week over week, in terms of total visitor traffic and page views, left the site with considerable headroom, and reduced chance of service interruptions.

2. I Made No Modifications to the Infrastructure

For several years now, louisgray.com has been hosted via FTP on Register.com hosted servers, powered by Google's Blogger engine. After considering many options available in advance of the WWDC keynote, it was determined the best course of action was again, nothing. Given the site's near 100% uptime over the last few years, despite significant year over year growth, the prevailing bias was to hold off on any significant software or hardware purchases which could cause complexity.

3. I Made No Advance Promises to Uptime

Murphy's Law dictates that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Many were surprised as to Twitter's advanced promise of significant uptime during the keynote, after such a recent spotty track record. By promising 100% uptime for louisgray.com, I knew that I would, in turn, be placing myself in the line of fire for overzealous hackers and an overcaffienated faction from the Mac army, ready to take my site down like so many others.

Conclusion

I think there's no other option except to congratulate myself for delivery of 100% uptime during a time of considerable stress for tech media giants. Where they zigged like moths to the flame, I zagged away from the noise, bravely hiding in the corner, cowering in fear. You can count on louisgray.com to deliver the 100% uptime during such mega-tech events, both now and in the future thanks to our unique strategy of reverse traffic optimization. I hope we can count on your support.

Disqus' Downtime Reminds Us of Woes for Data In the Cloud

I am a happy Disqus customer. Implementing Disqus comments on this blog, enabling people to track their conversations around the Web, show personal custom avatars and thread conversations, has been among the better things I've done with the blog. Since installing Disqus, total comments have increased, I can get a better sense of my most frequent participants and they can connect one to one. My Disqus comments, and those of others, can even be shared on FriendFeed and other lifestreaming services.

My enthusiasm has not been unanimous across the blogosphere. Some have been concerned that Disqus' hosting the comments on their own site reduces the control a blogger has on this critical element of their site. Others say that Disqus effectively "steals" the SEO value of those comments, robbing you of the Google juice that's yours.

And to date, I've defended Disqus in every way. I'm not an SEO nut, so I can shrug my shoulders at these so-called issues. Until today.

Starting last night, I was surprised to find my e-mail empty of Disqus comments flowing to my in box. Checking the blog, I found many heartfelt comments on the passing of our dog yesterday. But Disqus wasn't sending me the updates. I logged in to the service, and ensured my preferences were set to notify me, and they were.

This morning, the situation is much worse. No comments are showing. The Disqus widget on the right side of the blog is missing. And every Disqus comment that every person posted on any Disqus-powered site is gone. This highlights the concern many have had on trusting the cloud and putting your data in the hands of others. It's always good to make a copy, especially if you don't know their infrastructure, or the company doesn't have a decades-long track record.

I trusted Disqus to host my comments, to run the show, to power my blog and to take on the challenging task of being my connection to my audience. Now, they're down hard. Their blog hasn't been updated to say what's going on, and the last update we got from Disqus' Daniel Ha is that he was playing poker 10 hours ago, via Twitter. I just hope he didn't bet the future of Disqus on a pair of 3's.

In this time where users are turning their data over to the cloud and trusting the underlying Web services, downtime can be a killer. The second half of responding to downtime? Transparency. And right now, Disqus is failing at both.

See also: FriendFeed discussion on Disqus downtime.

My Double Standard for Web Services

I don't play fair. I admit it.

The kind of miscues and errors that would get big headline, keyboard-pounding rants from me when the biggest of Web services fall short might instead get a pass if I know the service is run by a small handful of developers, or if I'm on a first name basis with the author. Instead of joining a chorus of complainers about why a service doesn't act the way I wanted it to, or implying they are unresponsive or nefarious in some way, I give them the benefit of the doubt.

Part of me wonders if this is just due to my own personal biases, or if I should expect companies that operate to the masses to perform at a higher level. Just as you would expect to get better service from a paid relationship than a free one, does it follow that a company with hundreds of thousands of users should be more tightly honed than one with a few dozen or a few hundred?

I was thinking of this over the weekend as on Saturday, I logged into AssetBar, and found, to my surprise that none of my feeds were updated. Peeking over at Google Reader, I knew that blogs were still being posted to, news was still being written, and keywords were still being discovered by search engines. But AssetBar lied to me and said I had nothing to read. A shame!

Given how fond I am of their service, and its potential, I could have jumped up and down, shaking my fist. But I didn't. Instead, I lobbed a quick note to the site's developers and said there had to be a glitch somewhere. No big deal. And sure enough, AssetBar posted a note to their blog saying they were updating the servers, which had caused my issue.

But if it were Google Reader who had gone hours without updates, there's no doubt I would likely have said something, and many others would have stood alongside me, calling them out. Just see our reactions when this type of thing has happened before:

Google Reader Down Overnight?
Google Reader Glitch Deletes Feeds: Blogosphere Weeps
Ack! Google Reader Update Wipes Out History

Now is that entirely fair? Probably not. Poor Google Reader team. I know they work hard and do a great job. But I also know that when it comes to smaller services just getting off the ground, like AssetBar, FriendFeed, LinkRiver, ReadBurner or RSSMeme, if they blow up something, or a key feature goes bump in the night, I'll likely give them a pass.

After all, ReadBurner did go down hard on February 1st, and took the entire site history away. (See: ReadBurner Down) When it did, I jokingly posted, Forget Twitter Issues... ReadBurner is Down!, and in the same post, gave Alexander Marktl praise for taking the opportunity to eliminate duplicates and add new features.

I never would have let Google get away with that, or Microsoft, YouTube, Apple, you name it. The big guys are held to higher standards, and always will be. It comes with the territory. That might not be fair, but that's the way it is.

Google FeedFetcher and FeedBurner Miss Each Other Again

This hasn't exactly been FeedBurner's best week.

First, the RSS syndication engine dropped all-time statistics due to a code error, and didn't quickly respond to user complaints, leading to questions from around the blogosphere, mine included. Making the problem worse was that the company's blog, once quite active, hadn't been updated in three months, most notably called out by Mashable.

Seemingly, both those issues were resolved, first, with the restoration of all-time stats, and second, seeing FeedBurner update their blog with a post, Hello? Hellooooo?, where they outlined their recent activity. First on their list? "Full integration with Google", no doubt much harder than it sounds.

But now, the very next day, it looks like Google's FeedFetcher, which reports how many RSS subscribers a blog has from Google Reader and iGoogle, didn't update FeedBurner. And around the blogosphere today, statistics are undoubtedly plunging. For example, louisgray.com saw subscribers more than cut in half, from 606 yesterday to 241 today, and ParisLemon plummeted, from 550 yesterday to 288 today. It's not the first time this has happened, but past instances have always led to promises of improved integration, and they're clearly not there yet.

It's enough to make me curious how RatingBurner is going to handle this data, once they synchronize their stats tomorrow.

AssetBar Proposes Solution to Twitter Scaling Problem

While I've previously talked about AssetBar's capabilities as a next-generation social RSS feed reader, expected to open to the public soon, the secret sauce behind AssetBar's efforts is a distributed database system that eliminates a lot of the issues with traditional SQL or relational database environments. Their differentiated approach to the database means AssetBar is highly extensible, with futures not only in RSS feeds, but corporate intranets, Web office, and maybe... as a solution to popular services, like Twitter, who can't seem to stop going down.

As services on SQL databases, like Twitter, strain under dramatic growth in terms of users or activities, users can see downtime. And as AssetBar states in a post this morning, where its proposed they could act as a Twitter proxy, you could enter your Twitter credentials on their site, on their database, and it would interact with Twitter just as if you were on Twitter, but without being impacted by outages. If Twitter was down, your "tweets" would remain in queue, not blocked, as is the case today.

So what's the issue causing downtime in the first place?

AssetBar claims that as popular users like Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble have gained more than 6,500 followers, and follow 6,500 folks, that means every single tweet is written and rewritten thousands and thousands of times. And just imagine if they're talking to each other. Double the problem. And writes are harder than reads. While it's just a 140 character message going out on the wire, multiply that by 6,500, and you're talking almost a million characters going somewhere. Assuming 300 words in a double-spaced Microsoft Word document, a well-populated tweet would have about 3,000 pages of impact, or reading the fabled monolith novel War and Peace more than two times.

But AssetBar says they have a smarter approach, using their database. They write, "It so happens that our new distributed database technology is rather well suited for twitter-style high-volume reliable messaging. "

Would they try to compete with Twitter? No way. They say "Twitter is the new mail", and it is now mission critical for many people. They want to solve the downtime issues, for the community.

Maybe they're on to something. Check out their full post, "Twitter-proxy: Any Interest?", and provide them feedback as to whether you think they should get in the ballgame and help Twitter-holics out. They would first look to the community's blessing, and get a nod from Team Twitter, before moving forward. But if their database is as unique and strong as they say it is, it could get real interesting real soon.

Forget Twitter Issues... ReadBurner is Down!

Just yesterday, I suggested that ReadBurner was, by far, the most impressive product to debut on the Web so far in 2008. Of course, given that was in January, the change in the calendar to February 1 could also mean a change of luck. Around midnight last night, I was unable to check in on ReadBurner and see the most shared posts or those getting momentum - and was halfway through e-mailing the developer behind the site, when I figured he probably already knew about it.

Of course, he is aware of the issue, and provided an update this morning on the ReadBurner blog. (See: ReadBurner Down)

"I knew this would happen sooner or later: ReadBurner is down. My Amazon instance crashed. Argh…"

Never one to miss an opportunity to add features, Alexander says he may restart the service from scratch, eliminate double items once and for all, and build improved language filters. The expected time to restart is about three hours. Looking forward to its return.

iPings Ping Service Suffering Multi-Day Outage

Since early last year, when Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion introduced me to iPings, I've relied on the multi-service Ping engine to update sites including Technorati, Weblogs.com, FeedBurner and IceRocket, alerting the services that my blog had been updated. Using a simple form, I could enter my data in iPings and hit all the services at once, rather than updating them individually, or hoping their spiders were quick.

But for this entire week, iPings has gone missing, offering instead a stark notice, saying, "ipings.com is down for maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Please check back soon."

But unlike Twitter, which goes down for maintenance seemingly a few times a day, iPings has never come back up, and it's tempting to think the service just might be gone - leading me to use my backup, Pingomatic, or trust the Web crawler gods.

While iPings never sported the most creative of Web layouts, and often annoyed with flashing banner ads or unreadable captchas, it simply got the job done. Now, I have to wonder if they're all done too.

Google Update Breaks Embedded Shared Links

Often in engineering, a new feature comes with a tradeoff - new bugs. It appears that with the introduction of the new Google Reader, all bloggers who embedded their "Shared Google Reader Links", as I did, have seen their links disappear.

The ability to easily display my shared items from Google Reader in my Blogger template is one of the best features of Google's RSS feed service. Rather than updating my blog manually with each new shared link, the code was automatically refreshed through JavaScript. But as I noted on the Google Reader support forum, "something is broken", and there's nothing I can do to restore the feature.

As another avid Google Reader user writes, "Please fix this ASAP cause i have big community of bloggers internaly connected with this and it would not be nice to tell them all to change the code."

Just when I thought Google Reader was ready to turn the corner, and graduate from Google Labs, I found out this happened. We'll see how long it takes the company to respond. Previously, they haven't been fast at all in responding to user complaints and outages.

ZoomClouds Seems To Have Floated Away

The visual tag cloud engine ZoomClouds seems to have disappeared, taking a significant piece of my blog sidebar with it. Whether this is a short-term bug or longer term outage, the service, which used to show those topics I most frequently blog about (i.e. Apple, Google, Microsoft, TiVo, ANtics) is down for the count, and there is no news as to why or for how long.

Promoted by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch in March of 2006, I added the service the next day, and for the better part of 18 months, have enjoyed seeing certain keywords grow with increased use, and others fall out with neglect.

But now, the service's publishers seem to have gone away, without any notice as to why.

The URL Zoomclouds.com, which redirected to zoomclouds.egrupos.net, now redirects one final time to the generic site egrupos.net, home of the service's authors, and my ZoomClouds widget remains blank.

You can see cached images of blog ZoomClouds on Google, but for now, the service appears to be dead. Unfortunately, this means I will be pulling ZoomClouds from my sidebar, and I'm not sure if I'll be looking for a replacement.

Update: As luck would have it, ZoomClouds are back up and running, as of mid-day today. No sign as to why they were down, but it sure did make me look silly.

Google Ignores Users During Major Blogger Outage

Last night, when I tried to make two posts to the blog, Google's Blogger service stalled out, saying "your publish is taking longer than expected." But try as I might, repeated attempts went nowhere. Turns out FTP Publishing through Blogger was seriously broken, and not just for me, as a well-trafficked Google Groups support board shows.

Starting around 4 p.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday, Blogger users who utilize the FTP Publishing option, as I do, were unable to post new stories. And while they tried to contact Google through the company's own Google Groups service, the company made absolutely no response. You can see the frustration mount...

• Two hours in: "I'm seeing the same problem. Frustrating, isn't it?"
  
• Four hours in: "blogger just sits and spins without successfully publishing anything"
  
• Five hours in: "This is a serious problem! I can't believe it. Blogger should do something ASAP"

But Google didn't respond, and the service stayed down, driving users nuts.

• "Google's customer service is abhorent. These treads are full of issues that are never resoolved" (sic)
  
• "7 hours have passed since i first noticed FTP publishing was down..."
  
• "What happens now? Do we just discuss the problem amongst ourselves until a Blogger technician takes pity on us, or what?"

For many, it seemed incredulous that a company like this would be completely dark when all of us were affected.

"It is pretty unbelievable that it has been down so long without any kind of acknowledgement or statement from Blogger. Take 30 seconds to post an update!"

"Come on Blogger? What's up? Anyone got a update for us? Anything? It's 4:24pm (CST) here, and we're well over 24 hours into this issue with no resolution, nor any Google/Blogger response"

Meanwhile, the company's Blogger Status page never updated, nor did the Help site or the Known Issues page. Google never acknowledged a problem, nor did they come to the discussion board where those seeing the issue were asking for answers.

At some point mid-day today, the issue cleared up, but instead of an apology or an explanation as to what happened, or why it won't happen again, the company's users were ignored, expected to accept the level of downtime. I know it certainly threw a crimp into my schedule, and I'm not all that happy about it. It's enough to make me once again make sure I have all my data backed up and can change platforms (again) if necessary. I hope that won't be the case, but to answer a serious outage with silence doesn't fill me with pleasure.

Google Reader Back Up By Morning

It turns out the Google Reader crew jumped into action after their alarm clocks went off this morning, restarting the service after six a.m. Pacific time, following what was an approximately eight-hour outage. There hasn't been any notice as to why the outage occured on the company's product blog, but Mihai Parparita, here and elsewhere, apologized for the outages, saying feeds should be refreshing again. And they are.

The outage came at a less-impactful time for those of us based on the West Coast of the United States, but for those in Europe, India and elsewhere, it couldn't have come at a worse time, staying down throughout the day. Google Reader's news group lit up with reports around the world of frustrated techies who couldn't get their feed fix.

It's clear the redundancy held so dear by Google's mainstream apps, like search, hasn't yet trickled down to the individual apps and lab projects. For those of us who have been early adopters and made these projects part of our daily routine, we can only hope that practice is resolved shortly. Until then, we'll keep backing up our feeds, and watch for future bumps.

Google Reader Down Overnight?

It's not often that I go more than two hours without any new RSS feeds, even if it is in the middle of the night on the weekend. But if I were to believe that Google Reader were fully functioning, then that's what the RSS feed reader would be telling me, as two hours into my Monday, I'm still at zero feeds, and I don't have any solid proof that anything has been delivered since 10 or so Sunday.


Something is wrong. And given that it's so late, and most are asleep, it's a very quiet outage right now. Truth is, if people are saying anything about it, it sure as heck isn't hitting my RSS feeds in Google Reader... for obvious reasons.


Over the last few hours, I know there have been updates, thanks to Technorati, and my own efforts. A story I posted to Athletics Nation around midnight hasn't crossed to Google Reader, nor have my two posts here, or Tony Chung's note on opening up a new GeekWhat forum. As Tony is one of my Technorati favorites, I knew he posted, but otherwise, we've got radio silence in the blogosphere, and as they say, it's quiet... too quiet.

If I lose RSS for any extended period, I just might resort to actually visiting individual sites. And we all know that would be a real tragedy.

Confirmed: Reader is down, apparently for everyone. Google's engineers all appear to be asleep. Additional coverage here and here and here. (TechCrunch is also on the case.)

Comcast Cable Out Again - 7 Hours and Counting

For the second time in a fortnight, our Comcast Cable access to the Web and television has been completely knocked out, without any rhyme, reason, warning or apologies.

The first sign came at work, when I got an e-mail from Kristine, containing the note, "P.S. TV and (Wifi network) are down. Thank goodness for neighbors wifi." That was nearly seven hours ago, and so far as I can tell, our cable TV and Web access are still out, sending us scrapping for alternative entertainment, and new ways to get online. So far, we've determined which open WiFi networks in our apartment complex utilize Comcast, and therefore aren't working, and those that are working, and therefore, must be using an alternative vendor. The good news is that one works well enough for me to get the basic Internet readings done and let me contribute my whining here.

One line's outage has significant impact, setting off a chain of events. Our TiVo is recording gibberish. Our Apple TV isn't showing anything from YouTube or the iTunes Store. Our PowerBook isn't connecting at all, and I'm stuck on the Dell trying to eke out something resembling bandwidth. The only real technology item unaffected so far appears to be the Blackberry. With time, I'm sure Comcast's evil ways will take it down too somehow.

Bloggers Panic as Google Stops Reporting RSS Stats