ThoughtFactory.CreateThought() A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer

Full to the Brim

It seems that the recent capacity and load management problems being experienced by several social networking sites are self perpetuating.

Regardless of the application, users always have preconceived expectations with regards to performance, usability and availability. If those expectations aren't met, they like to let people know about it. Depending on the environment and target audience, you can always expect a disgruntled user to call, email or talk to someone with the express purpose of getting that person to:

1. handle their support problem or;
2. listen to them whine

More often than not, users will choose option 2, and proceed to use their communication medium of choice to tell as many people as possible that they are unhappy.

So what happens when it's a social networking application such as Twitter or Facebook that's having the problem? Well, as long as the system is partially up and running, users will continue to use the system to complain about it being too slow or partially unavailable, after all, it is the communication medium of choice for many of the users. Even in times of a total outage, users will often wait for the service to come back online and then start using it to tell all their friends about the outage, as if they didn't already know.

The recent Twitter replies tab outage is a great example of an outage that simply generated more user content, potentially exacerbating the problem. Minutes after the problem occurred, my twitter feed filled with people telling me all about it, and even more people chimed in with replies to those comments. I can't imagine that this helped whatever problem they were having, and any application that has a fan club for their "out of service" mascot certainly doesn't need to have it's performance problems inflamed in any way, shape or form.