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Are You Okay, Web?

Believe me or not, but there’s something seriously wrong with the web. In fact, I have observed that it has never recovered after the May 14 trauma that it experienced when Google systems went out of order.

During the past 10 days or so, most of the sites are showing totally erratic behavior. They’re either not opening up or only some pages are working for them. When you click on the links, they refuse to work. Or text appears but pictures disappear. And after sometime, everything is suddenly normal. No, it’s not any evil spirit. I don’t believe in that. Then?

First, I thought the interruptions are happening to high-traffic content sites. But no; it’s true even for one-visitor-a-day kind of company sites also. As I couldn’t find any pattern in this change, it seems to be all random. This could be a local problem also in my area (I live in New Delhi, India and use a Wi-Fi connection for Internet access.)

If other users are also facing such a problem, they may use the “Comments” section with this article to share their experiences.

This may be a local or temporary flaw. In general, however, I must tell you that this web thing is not yet stable. I have been using various web tools and technologies for over 10 years and have written a lot about them. During this period, I’ve observed that their number has been increasing exponentially, but their reliability has always ebbed down. Most of the web technologies – from search to social sites to analytics to content systems – are too raw and shaky.

And now this “social” trend is adding fuel to the fire. Today, any company that has anything to do with the web is hugely infatuated with this social thing. In the process, these companies are encouraging users to throw everything brought from everywhere into their own or public social sites.

So there’s an unruly hoo-hah in and around social media or social networking sites. While that has resulted in the creation of some colossal “information junkyards,” there are millions of people all over the world who want to be part of this mad social scramble. Obviously, when this crowd is growing, web is going to wilt under the pressure.

This could be a reason that after sometime web needs rest these days, and it’s slow in responding actively to users’ requests. Do you agree?

Rakesh Raman is the managing editor of My Techbox Online.
This article was published on May 25, 2009 at http://www.mytechboxonline.com/mtoweb/web-rrweb-05.html
You may please see the original version that also has reference links.