I’m not a big Twitter user, and only marginally more so on Facebook, but I’m encountering over-capacity issues on both sites with increasing frequency.  I’m sure this could actually be “site maintenance”, but doing that at mid-day is a bit hard to fathom since that is peak-demand time.

I don’t really think of this as a failing on the site’s part.  Sure, they’ve obviously got to increase their server capacity to meet this level of demand, but it’s really a testament to how popular social network sites have become.  According to my Alexa plug-in, Facebook is now the 4th most heavily trafficked site on the web behind Google, Yahoo and YouTube (MySpace is #9 and Twitter #56).

As a user, it’s all still a little unwieldy.  I’ve got friends who post all the time and clog up the pipeline, but I don’t want to drop them, and others who rarely post, and I want to be sure to see their stuff when they do.  A better management system has to be on the horizon for organizing and filtering this mess.

The one thing that doesn’t seem to be on the horizon is a dampening of enthusiasm or participation for posting/tweeting.  Clearly it’s a great way to stay connected, and to grow to such lofty volume levels in such a few years is truly amazing.

It’s like the web has been re-invented all over again.  (thanks, Yogi.  )

KidWithMatches is the personal blog of Pete Eberbach, VP Director of Online Marketing & Technology with St. John + Partners.

Tags: alexa, bandwidth, Facebook, google, MySpace, posting, social networks, tweeting, twitter, user experience, Yahoo, youtube

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 12:06 pm and is filed under bandwidth, blogs, customer experience, innovation, online marketing, social networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.