Earthling

Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.

An estimated 300,000 internet junkies were fiending on Wednesday night after the great Del.icio.us outage of 2005 left them without their usual means to create and keep new web bookmarks. It wasn't a full blackout, as you could still access your old bookmarks; you just couldn't make new ones or use RSS. And it didn't last long -- the error message said they'd be back online in an hour, but they were probably down for, oh, 6-12 hours.

I can't tell for sure because the del.icio.us blog entry about the power failure (which used to be here: http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/12/power_failure.html) is now gone. Hmm. *Update, the blog and entry are back up again*

I didn't realize how essential Del.icio.us is to what I do until I was without it. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it's a free web-based bookmarking and tagging tool. Instead of using your "bookmarks" or "favorites" menu in your browser(s), you send anything interesting you find to your del.icio.us account, and use words of your choice to tag it for easy finding and sorting.

It's an infinite tabbed accordion file for your web clippings. Your bookmarks are made public for other people to sift through unless you don't want them to be. You can spend hours virtually peering over the shoulder of your fellow del.icio.us bookmarkers to see what they've found. It has become a completely indispensible tool for my daily web habits.

If you're interested, maybe a future how-to will be devoted to making del.icio.us your best friend.

One thing that struck me this week is how dangerous it can be to depend on free stuff for professional purposes. It was scary to realize that I could have lost months of work for an indefinite period of time and had no way to recover it. I don't blame del.icio.us, and in fact for a free product I am very impressed with their quality of service. But it did give me pause. The great advantage of being able to access my web-based del.icio.us bookmarks from anywhere is a disadvantage when their service is down. I have no local, offline copy in case of emergency.

Once they are integrated into Yahoo's services (Yahoo bought them this week), I wonder if their terms of service will change. For right now, they provide "No Warranty," the service is offered "as-is," and there's no promise that I can see of a certain amount of uptime.

My first order of business is to come up with a plan for backing up my bookmarks from time to time.

*Update*: Del.icio.us came back, then it was down again, then it came back, and now it's down indefinitely as of Monday morning, 12/19.

Over the weekend, SixApart's blog hosting service TypePad also suffered from an extended outage. Here's an interview Niall Kennedy did with Six Apart VP Anil Dash. I'm impressed with the level of detail Anil is willing to share with the public about what happened and what they are doing about it. But I guess that's the kind of forthrightness you'd expect from a company that has built some of the leading blog-support tools.

What a week. My current RSS reader-of-choice Bloglines has decided to do a planned outage as well. They have announced it ahead of time and put a clear yellow warning notice on their home page.