On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 2:36 PM, Chris Burwell <cburwell@gmail.com> wrote:
I always laugh when I see Facebook and Twitter outages appear on this list! The first thought that comes to my mind is usually "who cares". No offense intended to anyone. I do realize that there are some companies that have legitimate uses for these services, I just come from the opposite end of the spectrum where we block them.
According to Alexa rankings, facebook.com has a reach of 30% of the Internet users, Google web search has a reach of 40%. And yes, companies have legitimate uses for facebook and twitter, in terms of marketing their wares, and finding/communicating with vendors, it would be insane to ignore opportunities for free marketing and PR channels there. Facebook, Wikipedia, MSN, Myspace, Twitter, Youtube, Yahoo, Google _are_ the internet, as far as joe sixpack knows. Blocking any of those is almost unthinkable, but your network, your rules. An outage of any of these is still likely to result in a report of "issues" from end-users. If you are an ISP, people are buying your services so they can access these. It is good for you to know if the sites themselves are actually having issues, so you can prove their issues are not due to your network. -- -J