Not a day goes by without a pundit or analyst predicting that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are important new collaboration technologies – not just for people to keep in touch with friends on an occasional basis, but also as serious marketing, communication and collaboration tools that might hold some value for corporations as well as consumers.
One day they may be just that, but they’re far from it today.
While trying to use Twitter this morning I was faced with this message saying the site is overloaded – and not for the first time I might add.
Then this afternoon Facebook ground to a halt too, because my account – yes my account, not just Facebook generally – is undergoing “site maintenance”.
Don’t these kinds of outages burst the bubble of anyone espousing the benefits of these sites as serious business tools? Enterprise collaboration tools need to be not just pervasive and intuitive – which Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter probably are – they need to be scalable and reliable.
Time to grow up, methinks.
