Dan G

MySpace, the most popular social networking site in the world (and one of the most popular websites period), is down.

At the time of posting, the following message greats you upon visiting MySpace:

"hey everyone! there's been a power outage in our data center. we're in the process of fixing it right now, so sit tight. hopefully we'll be back online within the hour. its 6:40pm PST now. wanna place a bet? -Tom"

Again, at the time of posting, that was over seven hours ago!

I've read post-mortem on power failures at the Wikimedia data centre before now; such outages often go hand-in-hand with severe database corruption that can take hours - or days - to repair.

It's also quite remarkable that a site the size of MySpace appears to run from just a single datacentre, rather than being based in several, widely distributed, datacentres.

Zoho are really turning out the online apps. I've been spending a lot of time with ZohoCreator in particular, building my own web app for use by a club. It's amazingly easy to use, and is developing fast - every time I take another look at it, there's more features, but often GUI improvements as well which make it easier to use, too.

The support is second-to-none too - ask a question on the support forum, and it's almost guaranteed that a member of the Zoho team will have an answer for you within in hours, and they try hard too. If the app can't do what you need now, they'll work on it and bring it out in a new feature release.

If Zoho has a problem, it's that they're trying to do everything. A look at their homepage shows they have twelve distinct product offerings! What's suprising though is that across the board, quality is high. With so many services you'd expect some to be below par, as surely they can't give each the development time it deserves? However, that doesn't seem to be the case. The products I've tried have proved mature and effective. Among them include the best online word-processor and spreadsheet apps I've seen, comfortably superior to both Writely and Google Spreadsheets. They are only lacking in one key area: each of the apps has a different look and feel. They should concentrate on unifying the GUI of their apps, to aid customer transition between them.

Zooomr 2.0 is within a hair's breadth of launching, at long last. Delayed from it's original launch date on Friday night by a distributed denial-of-service attack, the Zooomr team have been working hard to strengthen their defences against such attacks. They promise the new site will launch soon - in the meantime, the countdown clock is stopped with one second to go!

The attack seems to be symptomatic of a wider feeling that Zooomr has been over-hyped. The comments to a recent TechCrunch story on Zooomr were rather harsh, if somewhat misguided (the main protagonist, Drew, seemed incapable of reading the article properly, believing it to have been written by a Zooomr staffer!). There were some negative comments to Zooomr blog posts discussing the incident.

The main feeling seems to be that Zooomr has had much more coverage than it deserves. I suspect this is due to the site failing to meet the early hype surrounding Zooomr and its founder, Kris Tate, by announcing ever more delays to the launch of the next new version. There's a lesson there!

For the interested, the details of the DDOS attack from Kris himself:

whomever was attacking us were not interested in bringing us down as much as it seemed that they wanted to cripple us. You’re right in that DDOS is a serious thing that takes many systems, but in this case, it would seem very clear to me and my NOC that the attack was coming from many Zombie Windows XP boxes in the wild.

Most of the attack was based on SYN-packet flooding. In affect, this kind of attack does not require umpteen amounts of bandwidth, but enough computers to keep many unused connections open to our systems.

In the end, it was hard to lock-down these attacks because as we started to in the wee hours of July 14th, the attacker was smart enough to start spoofing and mangling their packets to get past our protection layers.

It seems Omnidrive is about to take the prize from Zooomr for the longest period from promising it-will-be-ready-next-week until the product actually rolling.

For Zooomr 2.0, which was originally promised in March, is launching tonight. Yes, TONIGHT!! There's a neat countdown to the relaunch, which is taking place at the Valleyschwag 3 party.

In June, Thomas Hawk joined Zooomr and has been very active on the Zooomr blog since then, bringing it back to life. Zooomr now also has another employee, Micheal-the-support-guy, bringing the total workforce to three (including Kris Tate, who started Zooomr).

Also worth a look is the neat Zooomr hits blog, a daily sample of the best from Zooomr. Well worth keeping an eye on.

Finally, I've also found a solution to a long-standing bugbear of mine with Zooomr: how to geotag pictures. However, that process will probably change in 2.0!

Today Marshall Kirkpatrick posted good review of Firefox 2.0 beta on TechCrunch. You can see the post as it appeared in my feedreader here.

However when I tried to leave a comment I was given a 404. Clicking the post title gives the same result.

Any ideas why? It seemed a fair review, free of the hype that typically surrounds Firefox.

My comment would've been this: with the addition of tab drag'n'drop in 1.5, and the ability to re-open closed tabs in 2.0, Firefox is creeping towards what Opera already offers in terms of features - however Opera has no system-destroying memory leak! Neither does it crash after a long period of usage.

The one big failing of Opera was poor support for AJAX rich web applications (e.g. it couldn't open Google Calendar or 30Boxes). Opera 9 has vastly improved in this area, and I've yet to find an web app it fails on. If you haven't tried Opera, I highly recommend you do - you might like what you find!

It's about a year since the Live8 concerts, and the last time I posted on global development. Recently I found a real eye-opener.

First, watch this video. It's a presentation by a guy called Hans Rosling, a public health expert from Sweden. It's an amusing and dramatic illustration of the truth behind development statistics - you cannot make generalisations, every continent and country is different. Although not highlighted especially in the talk, what struck me was the passing reference to teh fact that the countries that had develloped the most in recent times were those that had embraced free trade.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: anti-free-trade campaigners are trying to hold back the development of countries, and are harming people's lives.

After you've viewed the talk, have a play with the Gapminder software, which is actually hosted by Google. It doesn't quite do all the things seen in the presentation - you can't look at development within countries, for example, but nonetheless it's a fascinating and very revealing way to explore global development. Highly recommended.

Fabrik has got me thinking.

The basic premise is an online storage system which is also very efficient at organising and sharing your content. The idea is you upload all your media, where you can then access it from any computer, it is safe (in terms of professional-quality backup at-least, but what if the company folds?), and you share the bits you want to.

This contrasts with the existing plays by the likes of Flickr and Grouper, where all your content is kept on your own computer and you upload your "best bits" to share.

It will be interesting to see if this proves popular. I believe a system for storing useful documents online, e.g. via Omnidrive if they ever get their act together, could be very useful. But would you trust your whole digital life to a remote company, especially when hard drives are now so cheap? Plus there's the fact that, except for a lucky few, uploading gigs of data takes a long time even with broadband.

I prefer to keep my data on my home computer. I have a desktop and a laptop, and use the free FolderSync software to keep two copies of My Documents up-to-date on each machine. Off-site back-up with something like Mozy would, of course, be useful a useful complement to my system but certainly wouldn't replace it. I'd be too worried that the company would go bust. The only companies I would trust with such a service are the big boys like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Fabulous video, apparently by Microsoft, on YouTube, parodying how Microsoft would've designed the box for the iPod if it had've been an MS product. The result is the same box as you see for every other non-Apple MP3 player out there, and guaranteed anonymity in the stores.

Of course, it could be argued that if every product had an Apple-style box, then the ones in the MS style boxes would stand out. Furthermore, Apple can only get away with the total lack of product information on their boxes as everyone already knows about what's inside, and of course Apple stuff just works. Otherwise, people need information before committing to buying a product - however fancy the packaging, they won't buy a product if they don't know what it is, what it does, and whether or not it will work for them.

There's a happy middle ground I believe - design and branding that is simple enough and strong enough to stand out amongst all the other product boxes, but which conveys enough information to the buyer for them to be comfortable making their decision.

I've been very busy recently, hence few posts. I also got rather behind in reading my feeds.

I had some 30 Mashable and 25 TechCrunch posts to read. I have to say, I enjoyed Mashable more. It is focussed slightly more towards new ventures, while TechCrunch seems to have more news and commentary along side news on start-ups. Mashable does have commentary, but it's usually very succinct and to the point.

TechCrunch now has a huge audience of some 80,000 readers. Mashable doesn't publish figures but if the bloglines subscribers are any indicator, it has about the tenth the audience. So if you haven't already, check it out - it's well worth a look if you're looking for interesting, frequent and fast news on web 2.0.

A small British company called Camstreams provides a neat little service: you provide a live web cam stream, and they then redistribute it to up to 15 users, much more than most home broadband links could do by themselves.

Camstream uses Windows Media format and the quality is perfectly good. The site itself is quite well designed with a "who's being watched" section showing the streams which currently have at least one viewer. The stream can also be embedded into your own website.

With a limit of 15 users watching a stream at any one time it's obviously not going to set the world on fire, but it's a fun service to play around with.