Author Archives: keith

the end of the world facebook is down

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how many people when accessing facebook this evening suddenly thought their internet had gone wrong when receiving a server not found notification.

twitter became alive with the rumors that turned out to be true, life ground to a halt as people no longer knew how to run their lives, i bet the lights suddenly brightened due to less power required.

this evening only a few hours after gmail went offline for a time, Facebook did the same coincidence ? will we ever find out why! the 99.99% sla has not been met

 

Mega Monday

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Following on from my previous post on Cyber Monday articles all over the media now say today is the UKs busiest internet day. See the telegraph arcticle.

If Visa are correct the busiest hour will be 8-9pm and total puchases for the day being 6.8 million or £222,222 purchases a minute.

I would say that there will be a lunchtime peak of 12-2pm with all the work surfers.

Hopefully all retailers have done their homework and can cope of the load but from a web infrastructure point of view and from the backend process point of view from fulfilling the orders at the warehouse and sending out via the carriers for a correct delivery before christmas.

We are now approaching the time of restricted delivery options in the lead up to Xmas. As a customer the sooner you place the order the more chance you have of getting that ordered delivered before the big day. In the last couple of years forums have been filling up with complaints of missing deliverys. Unforeseen weather circumstances can play havoc with delivery services, you cant expect delivery companies to get through floods and snow when this happens.

 

Cyber Monday

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To quote wikipedia ‘Cyber Monday is a marketing term for the Monday after Black Friday, the Friday following Thanksgiving in the United States, created by companies to persuade people to shop online.’

This is also commonly known as the busiest day for shopping online for some reason cyber monday for the UK is deemed to be in alignment with the US. For the US it appears to be a proven fact that sales are at there peak probably in the main due to retailers offering crazy deals over a holiday weekend. As for the UK which is not a holiday weekend other than deals spreading across the atlantic and uk based retailers jumping on the deal bandwagon I cannot think of a reason why people would decide to suddenly shop on this day a month prior to christmas.

According to adobe US Cyber Mon­day online sales reached $1.98 bil­lion, a 17% growth ver­sus last year.

Australian retailers offering  was dubbed ‘click frenzy‘ this in the media has now been dubbed as ‘click fail‘ due to servers not being able to handle the load.

christmas is coming dont get scammed

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See the econsultancy.com dos and donts for a very good article on areas to be aware of.

Don’t be fooled by the online retailer selling the latest designer items at a fraction of the store price, you have not won that lottery that you have never entered, there is not an error with your bank account and you probably have not out of the blue been given a refund by the HMRC.

In general what seems too good to be true generally is. I am sure that we all think we wont get fooled but plenty have been and will be. Being online savvy is about gaining awareness and sharing this awareness with others.

Though remember keeping up your online guard is not just for christmas its every day of the week.

This does not just extend to online but also to landline and mobile communications. Don’t be tempted by the verbal or text communication that can be quite persuasive in handing over your cash for services that before you picked up the phone or read the text were not required without first checking up on the company.

 

 

 

 

social media – a history

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In the main most people are on facebook and twitter. Alot signed up to google+ probably more through hype than need how many of your friends or colleagues use google+ on a regular basis for interaction? Vic Gundotra Senior VP at Google indicated in a blog post in April 2012 that 170 million had upgraded to the new version.

In the uk most peoples introduction to soicial was probably friends reunited.

There are a myriad of others see social media for a list

I am quite shocked at the number that are out there, I am sure this list will grow; for the number of registered users it would be interesting to know how many of them are regularly active, though what is the definition of regularly active is it daily, weekly or longer.

There now appears to be a social group for different interests and various geographical based regions.

Facebook undoubtably has the largest online share but its precence is not the largest in the likes of China, Russia and Japan.

The two big player in China appear to be Sina Weibo (known as the chinese facebook) and Renren (twitter equivalent). Facebook apparently is locked by the “great firewall of china”. It may be too late for facebook to break into this market even if it was allowed to operate in china and operated using the censorship restrictions that china appears to enforce.