if connected

Earlier today Gmail stopped working, for most people, for about four hours.

It’s not the end of everything, as numerous things I’ve read today argue. It doesn’t blow apart ‘cloud computing’ or putting faith in other companies or other people. Computers break. Parts of the Internet fail. Even phones seem less reliable now. There’s nothing new here. Anyone that relies upon just one digital service, or device, will enjoy painful cold turkey sometime soon.

But what is different now, is how many ways we all have to do something. If our main phone goes down, we reach for our mobile. If twitter dies, then it’s back to Facebook, email, IM or the best option yet: Friendfeed. If one email address stops working, most people reach for another: The main pain with email failing is that incoming messages sent to the broken account can’t be read until that system — Gmail here — comes back up.

I use Gmail as a fallback to my work email because it is so versatile, Gmail has many alternative ways of access: I had few problems during the outage earlier as I access Gmail via IMAP on my PC, and on my iPhone, as well as using the web browser interface. So, I could read stored messages fine. Unlike Hotmail and Yahoo! mail, Google makes access to Gmail easy from regular Internet-standard PC/Mac/handheld/phone email software, complete with full folder management.

But, to take advantage people need to set up their phone or PC email software, and ideally in advance before panic has hit.

Thinking about the so-called cloud services, all the best ones work this way: remote access via a browser plus local sync for speed, fallback when the cloud rains, and for offline use, when the Internet isn’t available like on a plane.

After yesterday’s post, Recession reliability of the cloud, I’ve realised I was too narrow in my fears. Today Google, has closed or ceased further development on a number of its products, including: Jaiku, Google Notebook, Google video and a number of others.

It’s not just failing firms closing cloud services that we need to worry about. We need to spot which firms will retrench and cut back on the number of experimental and free offerings.

It’s the recession resilience of individual products that matters.

We’re all becoming more dependent on free websites: for storing photos, webmail, social networking, blogging, calendars, contacts, notes, sync, everything. But as the downturn shifts towards a recession more of these free sites will be at risk of sudden closure if last time is any indication.

Today, logging in to wordpress I was struck by the shrewd opportunistic net thrown towards livejournal users as wordpress promoted ease of import with a tagline on the wordpress dashboard. Livejournal has apparently just laid off a large part of its staff and is moving more of its operations to Russia…

I’m pondering how to have early warning of the risk to avoid last minute panics to back up content, or, sites folding during a two week holiday so I miss the chance to retrieve my stuff. Yes, I could spend time researching the viability of every firm that runs a service that I’m using, but it takes time and the reason to use most of these sites is time-saving and convenience. Anyone feel like starting a ‘failing firm watch’ website? I’m thinking a community effort could cover the ground much more effectively.

Perhaps it’s time to focus more on self-hosting and remote access to my home network, rather than leaving stuff in the cloud on someone else’s kit.

Which of these phrases would be the better way to announce to Skype’s users that the company had fixed the Skype network:
“Take a deep breath. Skype is back to normal.“
“Skype is back to normal. The whole world can talk again.“
The former are the words that Skype used and incorporates the current Skype tagline. The latter is mine, and is based on the one Skype used from 2004 until January 2007.
When are deep breaths required for normality? Don’t think too hard about this, the answer is not always pleasant.
Skype needs to fix its message, as well as the network.

The new Skype is still struggling to take a breath, any breath, let alone “Take a deep breath” (current tagline).
[I've never been especially convinced by, "Take a deep breath", and I don't buy the justification. I much preferred the original: "The whole world can talk for free". In English, "Take a deep breath" sounds too much like preparation prior to doing something extremely risky. This is hardly the best impression to create during an outage. Skype tip: post-outage will be a great time to change the tagline. ]
Although a fix has yet to arrive, at least for me, the company is doing an exemplary job of communicating progress. Skype have again updated their website’s front page and they’ve posted ongoing updates in the Skype Heartbeat blog.
Yesterday, when Skype performance was at its worst, I found Skype-in successfully sent incoming calls to voicemail. A test message that I left was delivered to my PC two hours later during a brief period when my PC’s Skype software managed to log-in to the network. Not great, but this is better than no service.
Skype has now taken more than the 24 hours that they estimated it would take to fix the network. The longer this goes on, and the more promises that Skype breaks, the more trust in Skype will fall and the worse the long term damage. If Skype aspires to re-gain trust quickly, expect some customer confidence building incentives once the network returns to normal.

The Skype network is experiencing major problems today, apparently it’s a software problem. Effect: Many people, including me, can’t log-on to Skype and so can’t access voicemail, make or receive calls, or send text messages.
Like the recent RIM network problem, the important piece here is less that Skype has tech issues, but how quickly Skype responds to the outage with a fix.
I expect Skype naysayers will jump up and point out that they never trusted Skype and that this one problem proves them right. But they will conveniently ignore how reliable and successful Skype has been for several years to date.
Regardless, in the digital communications era, it matters much less if one communication network is broken. 30 years ago when most people only had a landline voice phone, if that failed, then everything went with it.
Now, if Skype is down there are lots of alternatives: AIM, Y! Messenger, email (and which email account to use?), mobile phone call, sms, fax, Fring, facebook… oh and as a last resort there’s this fixed pstn phone thing here too…

Perhaps, it is a little unfair to highlight one vendors’ products and customer issues as all smartphones today have significant rough edges. (The user comments beneath this other piece are even more cutting).
But SonyEricsson’s announcement timing could have been better. Far from ideal to say “no more fixes” for several existing high end smartphones, just at the time when SonyEricsson’s current users will be reading the many European press articles about their new mobile competitor…
Also, this follows neatly from my post yesterday, as these are Symbian UIQ smartphones.