(story about Flickr being down for a good part of the day)
I've been saying for quite some time (but nobody picks up on it) that Google will run its competitors (Yahoo, MS, Facebook) into the ground in the competition to house huge amounts of user data.
The beauty is that while MS and Yahoo certainly have the money to invest in server farms, these scaling issues will drive up support costs, aggravate users, piss off advertisers.
These train wrecks are more fun to watch if you are expecting them (and not using the affected service). Grab some popcorn.
PS: I don't find Flickr nearly so awesome, unless you go for the paid options. In fact the strange ways they make your life miserable if you just want to store photos for free is more annoying than their 3 meg inboxes used to be. Keep filling up those disks though! Storage is dirt cheap they keep telling everyone (which shows how much they've thought about the problem).
Other related story (which I may or may not have already mentioned) was a recent graph showing the speed of various social networking sites. Results show Facebook to be almost the slowest of such sites on the planet, while Orkut is just about the fastest. Myspace comes out somewhere in-between. I also read today that most of Facebook's growth is in Europe. That was a surprise. It makes things nice and simple though, with Myspace keeping the US and Orkut still going strong in India and Brazil apparently.
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