As it comes as no surprise Gmail down this afternoon and I was unable to access my email for at least two hours. Obviously, the world didn’t end as some assumed it would, but it was certainly a major inconvenience. This raises a broader issue in regards to communications. If Gmail (or any other provider) were to go down for a sustained period, what would be the options for communicating with others?
Is there a substitute that would be able to take up the slack however imperfect?
- SMS: Perfect for immediate communications that are limited to one or at most two points. Mostly limited to one-to-one communications.
- Twitter: Great for general communications, essentially what I call virtual water cooler discussions. Able to have a one-to-many communication as well as private discussions one-on-one. Limited to 140 characters, which limits the amount of content and media shared.
- IM: Excellent for one-to-one communications, but the immediacy that is implied can impead discussion and discourse as well as complexity associated with email communications.
Seems like we are going to be using email for awhile yet. Interestingly, all new forms of communications tend to add to the options available and don’t replace preceeding forms. So, no replacement for email and when it is down I think we will have to simply deal…
About nathan kaiser
If one provider of email goes down, just use another. Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Windows Live Mail are all free. At least Gmail lets you spoof another email address so you can forward mail from another address. That way, you can change where your email forwards to change email providers easily. That’s what I do. But, if the provider of the forwarding service goes down, you might be out of email for a little while, but you usually won’t lose any email. The email servers always retry several times over a few days and give the sender notice if it doesn’t end up getting through.
It’s a little ironic to be reading this right now at 12:19 am, just a couple minutes after the server that hosts all my websites apparently decided to take a break. I’m sure this will not be helping the traffic for these sites – and only hope that it is only down a few minutes – and not two hours (or even longer).
The sites were only down for a couple of minutes, but it is always unknown and scary when it happens …