Now, our server going down is another issue. That has happened more than freaky web happenings. That stops a lot more.

Do you think resilience is a trait we learn using the technologies?

Your post on the topic of relying on web services that are often themselves dependent on a third party networks and infrastructure is a really valuable conversation to have, and everyone who uses a web-service should seriously consider, and make plans for, how they will cope when the service they rely on is not available for a time. Because if Google, Amazon, and Skype can go down, who can’t? But even if you dismiss the features that are only possible in a network setting(like simply collecting voices from all over the world) the web services will in the end, win out in overall reliability over their desktop counterparts. I know I’m a little bit biased;) but just as Alec points out, the vast majority of content that’s lost everday happens on the PCs, not at a datacenter like ours, http://www.hostedsolutions.com/data-center/facilities-specs.php The truth is we will make mistakes, sometimes our partners will fall short, sometimes Murphy perfect storm will strike(it did to us last week) but in the end your desktop pc cannot compete with our infrastructure, our back-up plans, and our paranoid, persnickety, and brilliant Systems Administrator. We lose sleep over the one in a million chance of losing user content.

ﾠﾠSo while I think the conversation you fostered is an excellent one, and should really be continued I do need to make a couple of corrections. A VoiceThread wasn’t ‘lost’ it was deleted by the user, I’m sure by accident. The e-mail I received stated that it “was accidentally deleted from my account. Is there any way to retrieve this???” Here was my answer, which does not include any references to ‘burps’

“Hello,

I’m sorry, right now there is no way to retrieve a VoiceThread that has been deleted. We’re going to develop a method for placing them in a ‘garbage can’ of some kind but it’s a very tricky problem because a Thread contains other users commentary as well as your own. Apologies for the loss, I know this can be depressing, we’re about to announce a way to download archival versions of a VoiceThread that can be saved on your hard drive.
Thanks and sorry about the loss of the Thread,”

I don’t want to sound defensive because whether we like it or not we are susceptible to service interruptions, but losing our user’s content is another story. Losing a voicethread has never happened to us, and I would rather shut the service down for a month than risk one of our users losing a voice comment from their grandmother on some old family photo. Losing our user’s content is the absolute worst thing that could happen.

Again, I think the topic of service reliability is an excellent one, and I don’t claim to be better than anyone else, but people should know the correct details, and how strongly we feel about protecting their content.

Thanks,

ﾠ

-Steve Muth

On the other hand, I am more likely to lost “my stuff” on my own hard drive in some cases.

Thanks for the interesting post!

The outage was confined to a selection of blogs and probably lasted between 4-6 hours… still not good though but we’ve taken steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

We’ve also sent you come credits to say thanks for your patience.

Cheers, James