Web sites - they can make your day, or drive you nuts.
It's truly amazing how much the Web enables us to do. Think of how much time it saves you - searching for flights, paying bills, defining terms, entertaining you, getting a map. Can you remember a time when you didn't use the Web for some of these things? I love the Internet and I couldn't imagine not having its conveniences.
But today, I had my share of bad experiences (don't worry, I am getting to a technical reference, if somewhat oblique):
11:15am. A friend of mine sent me a Friendster request so I had to log in and confirm he was indeed a friend of mine. Friendster is a pretty cool concept and has gained an early mover market advantage in the “social network” space, but their success amazes me because their Web back-end is TERRIBLE. It obviously doesn't scale. There is seldom a time I visit their site that I don't have a server timeout or some other error occur.
2:35pm. I try to book a flight to Sacramento. I start with Delta.com since I have a good frequent flier status. But instead, my visit is plagued with page errors, timeouts, etc. They lost my business when I got frustrated with all the errors, and this definitely isn't the first time I've had problems there.
2:55pm. Still trying to book my flight. I try United.com. Same issue. Their pages time out, searches bomb with bogus errors, etc. Once again, I didn't book a flight here because of problems. I finally used Expedia to buy a ticket on United and it worked great (of course I probably paid a premium for going through Expedia, but United.com didn't work so what could I do?).
5:30pm. It's the middle of the month, so it's time to login to Fleet Bank to pay my credit card. The entire freakin' credit card Web site area is down!
12:30am. Tried the fleet site again. No dice. What gives?
2:00am. I'm frustrated. Time to blog my troubles away...
So I started to wonder what could be causing all of this grief? Some Web sites work great, all of the time, but these 4 always give me trouble from time to time, and ALL of them were giving me troubles today. Well, I think I found the connection with a few quick Web searches...
Find the common thread? Hint: It starts with a “J” and ends with an “SP”. When are people going to learn? I guess when they start losing business they'll get a clue.
<update 2:21am fixed an incorrect link>