The trouble with Web 2.0

Yesterday morning, web users around the world went to log in to their Ma.gnolia accounts -- an online bookmarking service like Delicious -- only to find that the website had been taken offline. And it wasn't just temporarily dead; a notice (which is still up) had been put in place indicating that the problem was worse than a simple bum router. Data had been corrupted and lost, probably for good. That means that any bookmarks you stored on the service are very likely gone forever if you didn't keep a local backup, which I imagine very few users did.

Such issues are far from rare, and in fact they seem to be becoming more common as Web 2.0 services, designed to replace what we do offline with web-based counterparts, become more and more popular.

Earlier this month, Salesforce.com abruptly went dark, locking out nearly a million paying customers from its web-based CRM tool. Numerous companies use Salesforce.com as a vital tool for managing sales calls and the selling process, so even a relatively short outage (this one was about an hour) can cost a company's sales operation thousands of dollars or more.

Also recently, Technologizer's Ed Oswald griped that his Apple MobileMe account had all its synced contacts deleted after his subscription expired (this atop months of user complaints about MobileMe simply not working). And the web is of course legion with tales of webmail outages, each leaving hundreds of millions of users without service, sometimes for days.

And so it goes.

Now I'm beginning to wonder when, not if, the first truly catastrophic Web 2.0 meltdown will occur. We put immense faith in services like YouTube, Flickr, and Box.net to archive our memories and critical files... but what happens when they go away? (For starters, ask the users of Xdrive, which AOL closed a few weeks ago... hope you heeded the warnings to get your data off the site before that happened!) Of course, Xdrive's departure was an orderly shut down, not an abrupt crash like Ma.gnolia's...

The bottom line is that you can't trust an online service any more than you can trust your hard drive not to crash. Sure, the vast majority of the time everything will be fine, but eventually all technology products fail, and even the best safeguards are often imperfect. So once again I have advise everyone to thoroughly consider how they backup their data: Keep both local and online copies of anything you consider essential, and always remember that one of those copies could vanish without a moment's notice.