Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Twitter vs. RSS

Monday, September 7th, 2009

RSS is a huge part of my daily routine. One of the first things I do when I wake up is check my feeds, and I’m also perpetually connected via Gazette on my iPhone.

Fail Whale

When I first saw a post on TechCrunch claiming that RSS is dead because of Twitter, I was surprised that people would come to this conclusion so quickly. Twitter’s an incredible tool for networking, but I don’t think that it’s ready, at least yet, to become a standard for content distribution. The collective nature of feeds outweighs the random, stream-type nature of Twitter, not to mention the fact that RSS is a protocol, while Twitter’s a central entity. People can deploy RSS wherever and whenever they please regardless of the existence and reliability of Twitter. What happens when we get a fail whale? Does everybody’s news distribution just stop?

Twitter’s great. Don’t get me wrong. And if you’d like to stop using RSS, that’s totally up to you. But I’ll keep my Google Reader account for now.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Social Media, Web 2.0 | 4 Comments »

#googlefail: Are We Too Dependent?

Thursday, May 14th, 2009
Last week, the interwebs stood still as Google suffered significant outages. Details weren’t extremely revealing; a blog post from Google simply claims that:

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions.

Others believe that AT&T may be to blame (I was unable to get through on my iPhone’s 3G connection). AT&T, however, disagrees:

After reports on #googlefail being related to our network, we looked & have not identified any problems that could have caused the outage

Putting blame aside, the amount of infrastructure that Google supports is huge; from search functions to Google Apps, the Mountain View giant is literally everywhere. I’ll perform countless Google searches on a daily basis, check feeds in Google Reader, host my email on Google Apps, get directions via Google Maps – the list goes on. I’d go as far to say that at least 50 percent of my day revolves around Google.

I can't imagine my day without Google.

I can't imagine my day without Google.

Google openly states that their ultimate goal is to create an index of all the world’s content. But there’s an extent of unhealthy dependency that goes along with that. Even with a brief outage, everything freezes in motion. Are our lives tied too closely to Google? There are other ways to obtain information and services, such as Yahoo, Live Search, and the newly released Wolfram|Alpha. Unfortunately, Yahoo and Live Search don’t feel as efficient as Google, and Wolfram|Alpha is intended for an entirely different use.

But even if we are too reliant, I don’t see an immediate way around it. Indexing the world is a tough job, but somebody has to do it. I’m a huge centralization buff, and there’s no better definition of that than Google.

One of Google's recently unveiled servers.

One of Google's recently unveiled servers.

I’m not about to complain to the point of extremity. Most of the time, Google’s stability is exceptional. It’s also safe to say that they have a pretty firm hold on their servers over at the Googleplex – I’m more than willing to trade a few minutes of downtime for the existence of the awesome web giant.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Google, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »