A power outage earlier this week has hit del.icio.us very hard. They had restored partial service as of December 14, but had to take the entire site down again last night because of continued problems.
It’s a Web 2.0 moment, when the sparkling idea of grassroots utilities reveals some of its more problematic facets. The comments on both pages, especially on the “continued hiccups” page, are very interesting in this regard. What’s different, of course, is that there’s actually a place for these comments to collect and reveal what’s typically hidden (or only partially revealed) every time a utility goes down. There’s everything here from hostility and contempt to empathy and encouragement. I understand the entire spectrum of response. I’m annoyed that I have to hack my blog template to remove the del.icio.us feed so that it won’t hang the blog itself. I’m anxious to think that my accumulated bookmarks, tags, comments, etc. may be gone, for a little while or perhaps for good. As an IT administrator, I’m sympathetic to what I know must be frantic and hair-pulling times at del.icio.us, and I wish them well as they try to manage the PR problems at the same time that they’re working to get this giant back on its feet.
Most of all, I’m hoping that the idea of grassroots utilities remains viable. The alternative is familiar and depressing, as big capital creates an infrastructure that sets all the telecommunications rules we live by. Can grassroots utilities also make the trains run on time?
UPDATE: Looks like the data is (are?) safe:
Still waiting for the last remaining index to build. No data has been lost — we just need to fix the tables so the databases can find things quickly. This appears to be largely due to a RAID failure after our power outage earlier in the week – one of the indexes became corrupted and crashed the master database; for some reason the slaves replicated bad data from the master and then ended up crashing infinitely.
Another nice departure from traditional utilities: frequent updates with information that’s more useful than “your call is important to us.” Good luck del.icio.us.