I’ve been on Facebook since it was first opened to high school students, when it was still very basic. It was great, it was fast and much easier on the eyes than it’s dreaded counterpart Myspace. Then it became insanely popular and started to slow down, I understand that happening but it’s been in the news and publicized insane amounts over the past couple of years and it’s number of users has jumped through the roof. Granted I do not fully understand backend development on a site the size of Facebook but regardless, I find it a little pathetic that after all this publicity, money, and users that they still can’t manage to have uptime more than 1/4 (if even) of the time that I try to log on. For any other company on the net this would be inexcusable (look at Gmail’s recent outage and the ensuing outrage) but for Facebook it’s ok? Why?
Facebook’s development is great but to me it seems as though they’re moving too fast for their servers (or even users sometimes) to handle. They open the site to developers, great, but now it’s even slower and more annoying with all these applications. They open up their login to developers, great, but now if you try to use it you just have to pray that at that particular moment the site is responding and you don’t get stuck half logged in with a fancy little lightbox that you can’t get out of stuck over the site.
Today I pose one question and a possibly simpler answer. Why is Facebook able to get away with their terrible uptime/availability? My solution: Slow down. Stop trying to do everything at once, make sure the backend can support these ridiculous things.
I keep thinking that they might get on top of things and every time I do they swamp themselves with another release of the news feed or something of the like. I feel as though this is just irresponsible development and quite frankly, pathetic. I’m just waiting to pounce on the next big social network to get away from this horrid thing.