Diigo Buckling Under Pressure

May 13, 2008 admin Education, MGuhlin.net, Transparency

UPDATE 05/14/2008: The day after I wrote this, I heard about the
earthquake in China. 15,000 dead, total devastation. What does this have
to do with Diigo? You’ll want to read
this Diigo blog entry to find out. In the meantime, here’s a quick
excerpt:

On Monday, May 12, at 2:28pm Beijing time (6:28 GMT), a major
earthquake, measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale, jolted southwestern
China’s Sichuan Province. To give some perspective on how severe 7.9
magnitude is on the Richter scale: according to wikipedia, it’s
equivalent to 600 megatons of TNT explosive, or energy released by the
1980 Mount St. Helens eruption! Mother Earth has lot of unsettling
energy! Our R&D center is based in Chengdu, only 90 km from the
epicenter. When the quake hit, our whole team was still in a heated
discussion on features in our regular international conference meeting
(yes, we work very long and odd hours, and skype / gtalk are wonderful
must-have tools …)

All of a sudden, very loud rattling
sound came through. Our team in Chengdu said calmly over skype, “There
is an earthquake, we have to get out of here.” So I thought, well, it
must be another one of those small tremors, so I kept skype connected,
hoping to hear from them again soon. Shortly, news broke – a major
earthquake, measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale, hit the area, and
Chengdu is only 90 kilometers from the epicenter! That got our US
team really worried. . . .
Read
the rest

Be sure to read the rest. My sympathy and prayers go out to the Chengdu
team, as well as all the folks in China who survived the earthquake only
to face the challenge of making do with little or nothing. Blogging
about whatever just doesn’t seem as critical as the work going on.
However, experiencing this disaster through someone that has been so
responsive–Maggie at Diigo–has a profound effect. One thing is for
certain…if it took a 7.9 earthquake to knock Diigo out–and only for
less than 20 minutes with no data loss–then certainly Diigo can be
trusted with the rest!

Source: http://groups.diigo.com

Is Diigo buckling under the pressure, or is this a pernicious plot to
pulverize Diigo’s Groups and Messages area? As educators and others
go online to Diigo, is it possible that Diigo just hasn’t scaled well to
meet the demands? As you can see above, it’s clear that the Groups
portion of the Diigo site is down. Down time started around 10:20 AM
(San Antonio, Tx, USA time) and continued to approximately 10:36 AM…no
announcement posted on the Diigo Blog.

Earlier today, I uninstalled the latest version of the Diigo Firefox
Add-on…every page i was loading was taking forever as Diigo pulled in
annotations. My solution? A switch back to Diigolet, a slimmed down
applet that lacks a few features, mainly the inability to Twitter (which
may not be a loss for some folks).

Surely, the die-hard Delicious fan-club will say, "We told you so!
Annotating the web isn’t just unnecessary, bandwidth-wasting, but
unreliable!" (fictional quote composed by blog author). Of course, this
could all just be an unscheduled upgrade? This is the page that comes up:

Source: http://message.diigo.com

Eyes are watching whether Diigo will thrive under high usage conditions
and whether the Diigo.com backend upgrade will result in an even more
awesome resources for educators and their students!

In the meantime, check out Diigo.com! I
did!