Flickr was down - again.

Recently, I've been exploring Flickr and was getting pretty excited about its place in my arsenal of online tools to improve my own teaching and learning experience.  For those who appreciate that a picture can paint a thousand words, then Flickr is the tool for you.

But as I attempted to log on a few days ago, I experienced something that I've never observed before with a major social networking platform - Flickr was down, and down for hours. When I saw the odd notification screen, the first thing that came to mind was that I'd picked up a virus. There was this "Bad, bad Panda!" message with a picture of a little girl pulling a stuffed toy panda. Flickr may think it's cute but it's not cool.

It turns out that this was not the first time that Flickr has experienced technical difficulties affecting users all over the world.  And it wasn't just in the US but all over the globe.  Sue Glossop posted "don't tell me it's just me lol when it's not, Flickr is down again in Australia" just two days ago from around that time. In fact over the last year, Flickr's apparently been experiencing numerous problems and has been down any number of times.

What this really made me think of is our increasing reliance on the social networking platform for just daily existence.  As we feel the gratification from the 'produsage' phenomena, sometimes we feel like we just can't do without Web 2.0 and social media.  More importantly, I feel for those of us who use these platforms for educational purposes. Students design and submit projects via a growing number of tools that use the Web 2.0 framework and are encouraged or even required to use particular tools/activities for grading. A good example of many where malfunctioning tools can cause problem is when Josiah Windler of Paraguay writes "Flickr is flickering to an end and my photos will not upload. The Ubuntu Photo Competition is using Flickr uuuggghhhhh!!!" Ouch, I feel your pain.

Can you imagine if some of the bigger names in social networking like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn go down? What would the world be like without these three giants? Probably much quieter! But that silence would be short-lived because some brilliant soul would create something else to begin the chatter all over again, and the cycle would continue. But in a scenario without these giants, users, designers, owners and advertisers will all lose out and that's a lot of losing. Facebook alone, for example, services well over 1.2 billion users.

While Flickr's growing user involvement is around 92 million accounts, the message is clear - no matter how many tools there are, the platform on which they run must be reliable and robust enough to handle potential online traffic. Otherwise, the tool is worthless.  Flickr is a great resource but it must seriously address infrastructural issues if it wants to remain useful and competitive in the cut-throat social networking environment.