Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

We had a case of the Mondays. Sorry!

When sites inexplicably go down, or maybe inexplicably fail to update on Monday, people generally just want a bit of...explicating. Sure, it's pretty bad that your favorite page is unavailable, but if the guys in charge take the time to let you know why, it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling to counteract the gaping, frigid hole in your online routine. For instance, our bad for not updating yesterday; I was launching our Pro Football Pick'em site and then had to run to dinner with the family of one of my housemates, and JR was possibly off fighting crime. Warm fuzzies for everyone!

The best job I've ever seen of managing a site outage, though, easily goes to Flickr. Last week, they got bit by a storage bug and needed to shut down for several hours to move terabytes of photos between their data centers. First, they put up an error page that indicated they were having a massage---at least amusing, if not informative. Shortly thereafter, they composed a blog post explaining exactly what was going on and what options the Flickr team had. Finally, la pièce de resistance:

Flickr users were encouraged to spend the downtime coloring in the blank circles and upload their masterpieces to Flickr once it was back online, and the best entry would win a free year of Flickr Pro. So not only did users have something fun to do with their time, but they also could get a prize out of it and, heck, it sort of felt like they were contributing to solving the problem.

The results have been amazing. Really a testament to the spirit of the Flickr community as well as the ingenuity and imagination of the Flickr team.

Comments RSS 2.0 trackback.