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Noman Ali: Gadgets, Websites, Google, Social Media and SEO

“TechWorld”

Tag Archives: Web 2.0

October 5, 2010 Facebook Holding Special Event This Wednesday

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It’s been a big couple of months for Facebook — the site launched its Places feature in August, had a major gaming-focused event two weeks ago, and recently revamped its photos feature to allow for high-resolution uploads (which is a big deal). And it’s not done: an invite just landed in our inbox for a special event this Wednesday morning at 10 AM. Facebook isn’t giving any hints as to what this event will cover (sometimes they do — they told us in advance that the last event was focused on gaming). But the fact that they’re trying to get a bunch of reporters down to Palo Alto at 10AM would seem to indicate that this is important (please). Oh, and they’re giving us shuttle service, which probably means they’re inviting a lot of press.

We’re going to try to find out what’s being announced, but here are a few guesses:

  • iPad: The lack of an official Facebook iPad app has been glaring since the device launched six months ago, and while some third party apps have stepped up to the plate (and done very well financially), a Facebook app is still nowhere to be seen.
  • (More) Places: Facebook Places launched in mid-August, and it’s still missing some key features, particularly on the desktop version of the website. Likewise, we could see a much larger campaign urging local businesses to become active on Facebook Places.
  • Credits: Facebook Credits are being used in more games (they frequently came up in the gaming event last month). But what about a broader launch that lets anyone use them?
  • The Facebook Bar – Facebook has been working on a Meebo Bar clone for ages now — they even announced it at f8. Where is it?
  • The Facebook Phone: They denied it existed. Then they said it sort of does. A full launch is the next logical step, obviously.

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September 29, 2010 Facebook Down, Like Buttons Vanish, Internet Implodes


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If you’re currently writing us an email to tip us that Facebook is down, you can stop — we’ve gotten a few hundred of those in the past few minutes. Yes, Facebook appears to be down at the moment. I’m currently getting a DNS failure message (above), others are apparently seeing other things. (Update: I’m told that DNS message is actually an Akamai server error.)

This is a problem not just because the site is down, but Facebook’s omnipresent Like button is also completely down, and so is Connect, and Platform — in other words, the entire Internet (or a good percentage of it) is feeling this pain. We’ve reached out to Facebook to see what is up. More to come.

Until then, might I suggest you view the list of things to do when Twitter is down? It applies here as well.

Update: Facebook’s Platform status page gives a little more insight:

Current Status: API Latency IssuesWe are currently experiencing latency issues with the API, and we are actively investigating. We will provide an update when either the issue is resolved or we have an ETA for resolution.

You’ll also note that they had the same issue yesterday for a few hours — and yes, there were a number of reports yesterday of Facebook’s site being down as well.

Update 2: Here’s the statement from Facebook:

We’re currently experiencing some site issues causing Facebook to be slow or unavailable for some users.  We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.

Update 3: It appears that after well over an hour, Facebook is finally back. We can probably expect to hear more from them shortly about the cause of the problem.

Update 4: And here are the details about what caused the massive failure today — Facebook’s worst in 4 years.

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