Friendster, the once undisputed king of social networking, suffered months of slow operations and technical challenges creating massive frustration and paving the way for MySpace to take over. Friendster has rebounded to some degree outside the US, but it’s done as a mainstream social media platform in the West.
Google’s recent challenges with GMail may be creating a Friendster-like moment or problem for the service. Its recent slow operation and semi-unreliability could start to threaten continued use of what is one of Google’s clear success stories.
Undoubtedly the company is mindful of the danger of inattention to the problems. But I’ve got to say as a user that it’s pretty frustrating.
There’s also danger to the overall Google brand if GMail continues to falter.
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Gmail is having more problems, reported by the BBC.
February 27, 2009 at 6:34 pm |
Interesting. I’m a pretty heavy gmail user and I’ve not experienced any issues. The outage that techcrunch got so upset about was transparent to me.
February 27, 2009 at 11:09 pm |
Completely agree. I used to be a heavy GMail user, porting all of my various POP accounts into it. Now I’ve shut it off. It’s lacked basic functionality for years now, Google Labs offers a smattering of embarrassingly useless new features, and keyboard shortcuts frequently stop working or the page freezes. It was unable to delete just 2000 spam messages from any browser on three different computers for two weeks — I finally had to do them 100 at a time.
Google was/is great at search. They seem to ruin everything else they touch. I wish they’d knock it off.
March 1, 2009 at 2:51 pm |
I agree with Malcolm. I use gmail every day and I’m very satisfied with their service.