#FAIL! Top 5 Social Media Blunders of 2010
It’s December, which for many of us means the holidays, excessive drinking and eating, Ugly Christmas Sweater parties and reflection. If you’re writing for a blog or publication, it means pumping out a barrage of lists summing up the year. So, thank you Tumblr. Your utter failure for more than a day inspired this list we’ve compiled of the Top 5 Social Media Blunders of 2010.
Google Buzz
Part email, part Facebook, part Twitter, part Friendfeed, part Foursquare, fully lame. Google launched this social network on Feb. 9 and by Feb. 16 it was slapped with a major lawsuit. Google Buzz was integrated into Gmail, irritating many users, who were automatically signed up, revealing private information without permission. After many privacy violations, a class action lawsuit, Google Buzz has recently settled for $8.5 million. Buzz is still around, but has yet to make any sort of splash.
Twitter Hack
September 2010, hackers exploited a security flaw on the popular micro-blogging site, retweeting malicious code, activating pop-ups, and even exposing users to hard-core pornography.
Tumblr
Earlier this month, blogging host site Tumblr crashed for more than 24 hours, leaving millions of users shut out from their accounts, unable to access the nearly 11 million blogs run through Tumblr.
“During planned maintenance that was not intended to interrupt service, an issue arose that took down a critical database cluster. This brought down our entire network while our engineers worked feverishly to restore these databases and bring your blogs back online.”
Facebook Crash
A technical glitch blocked or slowed access to Facebook for several hours in late September, blocking many of the site’s (at the time) 500 million users from the news feed of updates from their friends.
Facebook called it the worst outage they’d had in over four years and blamed a software flaw that caused a cluster of its databases to be overwhelmed. Facebook said it had to shut down the entire site to stop traffic to the databases.
Ping
Apple’s stab at social media. Debuted in September with their iTunes 10, Ping allows you to follow friends, musicians and others and read about what music they “Ping” and “Like.” Failures here are that you can’t follow your Facebook friends and you can only comment on music purchased through the iTunes store, which for me is not an accurate portrait of my music collection. Though it’s taken a while to catch on, it does feel like the early days of Twitter to me, where people are following others, trying to sort out the purpose of this new social network. It’s definitely a great marketing platform for those in the music industry.
It’s not all negativity at BuzzRocket. All of these failures are a result of the tremendous growth and innovation of social media.
“Failure is the tuition you pay for success,” Walter Brunell
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