Google App Engine transparency quick check in

Keep it up Google!

Google launches health status dashboard for Google Apps!

Announced here and you can see it here. No time to review it today, but I'll be all over this in the next couple days. Kudos to Google for getting this out!

Update: VERY cool to see an extremely detailed post-mortem from Google on the recent Gmail downtime.

The best marketing advice I've collected over the years

This is completely off topic, but a co-worker recently asked me for some advice on how to market his new online game. I scoured my delicious bookmarks, found the cream of the crop, and came up with the list below.

I wouldn't recommend trying to plow through these links in a matter of minutes. There is some really meaty stuff here, and you won't get much out of it unless you take some time to digest the advice. On the other hand, most of these provide very specific action items, so you should be able to act on the posts right away. Enough talk, enjoy the fruits of my labor!

Best blogging blogging advice, for new and old:
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/if-i-started-today/
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/27-blogging-secrets-to-power-your-community/
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/11/the-number-one.html
http://www.conversationagent.com/2008/11/why-start-a-blog-and-25-tips-to-make-it-work.html
http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-write-a-story/
http://www.copyblogger.com/hot-content/
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/the-subtle-art-of-linkbaiting/
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/my-best-advice-about-blogging/
http://www.copyblogger.com/10-sure-fire-headline-formulas-that-work/
http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/ (awesome example to follow)

Best advice on making the most of Twitter:
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/11/looking-for-m-1.html
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/12/how-to-use-twit.html
http://www.ozonesem.com/social-media-marketing/how-to-get-retweeted.html
http://www.copyblogger.com/grow-business-twitter/
http://www.financialaidpodcast.com/2008/12/24/the-twitter-power-guide-ebook/

Awesome general purpose marketing advice:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/05/avoiding-the-pa.html
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2009/02/leo-babauta-on-the-tao-of-marketing.html
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ways-marketers-can-use-social-media-to-improve-their-marketing/
http://www.copyblogger.com/word-of-mouth-marketing/
http://www.salesforce.com/community/crm-best-practices/marketing-professionals/market-feedback/2008-mktg-exec-social-media-mktg.jsp
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104627

I spy with my little eye...Mosso working on a health status dashbord

The transparency that Twitter brings is awesome:


I'm looking forward to see how many of the rules of successful health status dashboards they follow!

Gmail goes down, world survives (barely)

As widely reported by the blogosphere, Gmail was down earlier today for anywhere from 2 to 4 hours. Panic did not ensue...except on Twitter. Plenty has been said about the downtime event (and the demise of the cloud thanks to events like this). I want to focus on my favorite topic...how transparent was Google, and did they use this opportunity to build longer term trust in their service? Let's read a few select quotes that I found most illuminating:

BusinessWeek:

What's more disturbing than the Gmail outage is Google's lack of transparency about it. The most recent post on Google's official blog declares the problem over, apologizes for the inconvenience, and explains why some users had to prove to Google that they were human beings before being allowed to log in to their Gmail accounts. But it provides no explanation whatever of what went wrong or what had been done to fix it or prevent its recurrence.

Amazon, by contrast, maintains a Service Health Dashboard for its Amazon Web Services with both a report on the current status of each service and a 35-day history of any problems (I can't tell you how good the reports are because the current time frame shows no incidents.) At a minimum, Google should maintain a similar site for the folks who have come to depend on its services.

Technologizer:

Google has apologized and says it isn’t yet sure what happened: I’d love to see the company follow up with a post discussing the outage, its cause, and the company’s response. I’m curious, for instance, whether there’s a single explanation for the multiple problems that the service has had in the past few months.

ComputerWorld:

Finally, it may not hurt to have a few links to the Google Blog and Gmail Blog on your Intranet so that they can find out if something catastrophic is happening. One of my users was smart enough to do this and alert the office.

VentureBeat:

Almost everyone I follow on Twitter seems to use Gmail. At all points during the outage, almost my entire stream was consumed with tweets about Gmail being down. And Twitter Search, perhaps the ultimate search engine for what people are complaining about in real time, not only had the term “Gmail” as a trending topic of discussions within minutes of Gmail failing, but it also saw “IMAP” and “Gfail” rise into the top terms as well.

Conclusion: Not enough transparency. Twitter again is the only means users had to share what was going on. Google's blog post was nice, but not enough to sate most people. I'm hoping Google comes out with a more detailed analysis, if nothing else to show that they are really trying.

Lessons learned: Provide more to your users then a single "We know there's a problem, and we're sorry" type blog post. This is the bare minimum, something the little guys should be doing. A service as prevelant as GMail must be more transparent. A simple health status dashboard would be a good start. Communicating status updates (at least once an hour) over Twitter would be powerful. Having an obvious place for your users to find status updates would be a start.

To close on a positive note, I think it was put best by Seeking Alpha:

I remember a few years back when my company’s email went down - for days, not hours. It would come back and then go away again as the IT team worked to troubleshoot and fix the problem. The folks working on that IT team weren’t necessarily e-mail experts, though. They were charged with doing everything from upgrading software to configuring network settings. Troubleshooting email was just another job duty.

I still maintain that a cloud-based solution - whether Google’s or anyone else’s - is a more efficient way of running a business. Don’t let one outage - no matter how widespread - tarnish your opinion of a cloud solution. Outages happen both in the cloud and at the local client level. And having been through a days-long outage, I’d say that this restore time was pretty quick.

One final thought: who out there communicates by e-mail alone these days? Speaking for myself, I’m reachable on Twitter, Facebook, SMS text, and Yahoo IM - among other services. Increasingly, e-mail isn’t as business critical as it once was. If you need to communicate with people to get the job done, I’m sure you can think of at least one other way to keep those communications alive beyond just e-mail.

Yes, the outage was bad. But it wasn’t the end of the world.

Transparency as a Stimulus

A bit off topic, but I just wanted to share a great article over at Wired about the transparency side benefits that may come along as a result of the stimulus package:

With President Obama's signing of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” better known as our national Hail Mary stimulus bill, billions will be ladled for infrastructure projects ranging from roads to mass transit to rural broadband.

But the law also contains a measure promoting a less-noted type of economic infrastructure: government data. In the name of transparency, all the Fed’s stimulus-spending data will be posted at a new government site, Recovery.gov.

That step may be more than a minor victory for the democracy. It could be a stimulus in and of itself.

The reason, open government advocates argue, is that accessible government information—particularly databases released in machine-readable formats, like RSS, XML, and KML—spawn new business and grease the wheels of the economy. "The data is the infrastructure," in the words of Sean Gorman, the CEO of FortiusOne, a company that builds layered maps around open-source geographic information. For every spreadsheet squirreled away on a federal agency server, there are entrepreneurs like Gorman ready to turn a profit by reorganizing, parsing, and displaying it.

...

The more obvious economic benefits, however, will come from innovations that pop up around freely available data itself. Robinson and three Princeton colleagues argue in a recent Yale Journal of Law and Technology article that the federal government should focus on making as much data available as RSS feeds and XML data dumps, in lieu of spending resources to display the data themselves. “Private actors,” they write, “are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data.”

Check out http://www.recovery.gov/ and http://www.stimuluswatch.org/ to follow this story.

Media Temple goes down, provides a nice case study for downtime transparency

Earlier today we saw Media Temple experience intermittent downtime over the course of an hour. The first tweet showed up around 8am PST noting the downtime. At 9:06am Media Temple provided a short message confirming the outage:

At ~8:30AM Pacific Time we started experiencing networking issues at our El Segundo Data Center. We are working closely with them to determine the cause of these issues and will report any findings as they become available.

At this time we appear to be back fully. The tardiness of this update is a direct result of these networking issues.

So far, not too bad. Though note the broken rule in hosting your status page in the same location as your service. Lesson #1: Host your status page offsite. Let's keep moving with the timeline....

About the same time the blog post went up, a Twitter message by @mt_monitor pointed to the official status update. Great to see that they actually use Twitter to communicate with their users, and judging by the 360 followers, I think this was a smart way to spread the news. On the other hand, this was the only Twitter update from Media Temple throughout the entire incident, which is strange. And it looks like some users were still in the dark for a bit too long. I was also surprised that the @mediatemple feed made no mention of this. Maybe they have a good reason to keep these separate? Looking at the conversation on Twitter, feels like most people by default use the @mediatemple label. Lesson #2: Don't confuse your users by splitting your Twitter identity.

From this point till about 9:40am PST, users were stuck wondering what was going on:


A few select tweets show us what users were thinking. The conversation on Twitter goes on for about 30 pages, or over 450 tweets from users wondering what the heck was going on.

Finally at 9:40am, Media Temple released their findings:

Our engineers have spoken with the engineers at our El Segundo Data Center (EL-IDC3). Here are their findings:

ASN number 47868 was broadcasting invalid BGP data that caused our routers, and a lot of other routers on the internet, to reboot. This invalid BGP data exploited a software bug in our routers. We have applied filters to prevent us from receiving this invalid data.

At this time they are in contact with their vendors to see if there is a firmware update that will address this. You can expect to see network delays and small outages across the internet as other providers try to address this same issue.

Now that everything is back up and users are "happy", what else can we learn from this experience?

Lessons

1. Host your status page offsite. (covered above)
   
2. Don't confuse your users by splitting your Twitter identity. (covered above)
   
3. Some transparency is better then no transparency. The basic status message helped calm people down and reduce support calls.
   
4. There was a huge opportunity here for Media Temple to use the tools of social media (e.g. Twitter/Blogging) as a two-way communication channel. Instead, Media Temple used both their blog and Twitter as a broadcast mechanism. I guarantee that if there were just a few more updates throughout the downtime period the tone of the conversation on Twitter would have been much more positive. Moreover, the trust in the service would have been damaged less severely if users were not in the dark for so long.
   
5. A health status dashboard would have been very effective in providing information to the public beyond the basic "we are looking into it" status update. Without any work on the part of Media Temple during the event, its users would have been able to better understand the scope of the event, and know instantly whether or not it was still a problem. It would have been extremely powerful when combined with lesson 4, if a representative on Twitter simply pointed users complaining of the downtime to the status page.
   
6. The power of Twitter as a mechanism for determining whether a service is down (or whether it is just you), and in spreading news across the world in a matter of minutes, again proves itself.