FriendFeed Status Blog Anyone? FriendFeed Is Down and It Is Very Disappointing.

Svetlana Gladkova,

on August 05, 2008,

Hello. I'm Svetlana and I'm a FriendFeed addict. I have a habit of checking FriendFeed every time that I strike out every single completed task on my to-do list (yes, I admit that I'm conservative enough to still do it on paper). A few minutes earlier I clicked the "Publish" button on the previous post and went to FriendFeed to see if I had anything urgent or interesting to reply to. And I failed. No, I mean FriendFeed failed:

FriendFeed downtime screenshot

I have always thought it was simply insane when people constantly discussed Twitter fail whale and how they don't know what to do when Twitter is down. And now I find myself in exactly the same position over FriendFeed - and it actually feels even more disappointing than I could expect at all.

Sure, I do have other things to do: I could do some reading or some writing or I could finally clean up my inbox or see if anything else requires my attention. FriendFeed definitely is not the only thing I am focused on during the day but I have definitely developed a habit to switch from one activity to another (with FriendFeed serving as "another"), something very similar to having a cigarette and then returning to the next task with a fresh mind (I know, smoking does not fresh one's mind, it poisons you but still it's what smokers try to make everyone around believe).

And having FriendFeed down makes me feel like quitting smoking - it may be a very good thing to do not to check FriendFeed time and again but it is something I just can't imagine my life without and it hurts.

FriendFeed was only down for a few minutes (half an hour maybe) and everything is back to normal now (though I still can't perform any search on FriendFeed) but even this short time was enough to cause a real commotion: "FriendFeed" is the 2^nd most popular term on Summize now with the majority of people either asking if FriendFeed is down or noticing it is back to normal so Twitter is definitely abuzz the event.

I am not going to predict that FriendFeed is going to follow Twitter's downtime pattern, I believe in the guys behind FriendFeed enough to think they will avoid any massive and frequent downtimes. But I would not mind having a FriendFeed status blog - just in case…

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14 Comments (Subscribe to rss)

roblogger - August 05, 2008 at 05:27 am PDT

yes, i noticed that too on my blog. it is like in the case of twitter.
gregorylent - August 05, 2008 at 05:37 am PDT

amusing how rarely we learn from others’ mistakes, we have to learn from our own only, it seems. friendfeed guys watched twitter discover the need to have a blog on a separate host, but somehow never made the connection. no wonder human problems never go away, they just get recycled in the next generation
Andrés David - August 05, 2008 at 06:33 am PDT

I won’t comment about FF withdrawal because I agree with you and because it was too early in the morning here so it didn’t really affect me. But I will comment about being “conservative enough to still do it on paper”. I don’t agree with that. I think it’s paper is quite bleeding-edge technology right now: efficient, portable, readily available and everyone knows how to use it. I still have to find a note-taking application that gives me the same freedom and power.

…

That’s what happened when I tried to imagine what you withdrawal felt like
Ontario Emperor - August 05, 2008 at 08:12 am PDT

I found myself in the odd position of going to Twitter to talk about a FriendFeed outage.

Andrés, several years ago I saw a book that talked about a miraculous word processor with all sorts of capabilities. It was yellow-colored, filled with graphite, and had a red rubber tip that provided “Clear” functionality.
Rahul Das - August 05, 2008 at 05:08 am PDT

it was down for a while a few hours ago. It seems to be fine now.
Brian Daniel Eisenberg - August 05, 2008 at 05:08 am PDT

I wonder if this is sporadic, because it’s been working fine for me this morning. Looks like the outage was about 3 hours ago (while I was zzzzzzz) and everything appears to be back in order now.
Svetlana Gladkova - August 05, 2008 at 06:08 am PDT

Brian: Lucky you are for being zzz at the time and not noticing It really felt alarming to me.
Svetlana Gladkova - August 05, 2008 at 06:08 am PDT

Mark, that’s exactly what I think. Actually as soon as I noticed FF was down I rushed to the official blog only to find an entry a few days old. And only summize confirmed I was not alone in my pain. Probably since this seems like the 1st experience, they will come up with some solution for FF addicts that are numerous
Svetlana Gladkova - August 05, 2008 at 06:08 am PDT

@Rahul: Sorry, did not realize it was not to me. Usualy when I initiate the thread, I feel kind of responsible for replying everyone
Mark Dykeman - August 05, 2008 at 06:08 am PDT

@Svetlana, good point about having a separately hosted blog for FriendFeed status, just in case.
Svetlana Gladkova - August 05, 2008 at 06:08 am PDT

Rahul: That’s exactly what I mentioned in the post - everything seems to be fine now, including the search functionality that seemed to be down longer than the other features. But even this short downtime brought FriendFeed to the 2nd most popular search term on Summize.
Rahul Das - August 05, 2008 at 06:08 am PDT

@Svetlana: I know, I read the blog. I was talking to Brian. Should have mentioned it
Brian Daniel Eisenberg - August 05, 2008 at 06:08 am PDT

@Svetlana - believe me, I feel your pain. Me = addicted to FF.
Svetlana Gladkova - August 05, 2008 at 11:21 am PDT

@gregory: If we all were able to learn from others’ mistakes, the world would have become such a boring place. Just imagine everyone around perfect or near perfect

@Andres: Thank you for the support on the paper issue I myself rely too much on my vision for information and that results in me having various papers around me for different tasks that I have to complete. I may have online calendars and some desktop ones as well but I never found any of them as efficient for organizing my time as a simple piece of paper is. But what bothers me is that I try to live in a more or less green way and I don’t like the fact that that piece of paper caused death of a tree.
Right on spot with my withdrawal: it definitely was difficult and resulted in this higgledy-piggledy post

@Ontario Emperor: Same here. The first thing I did was ask on Twitter if I was the only one suffering from FF downtime (Twitter is actually what I use to make sure a website is really down for the rest of the world, not me only). The story repeats itself: first we discussed Twitter downtimes on FriendFeed now we discuss FF outage on Twitter. I only hope FF will not exactly follow Twitter pattern.

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