OK, Rand, you want to know the real difference between a Web 2.0 site and a Web 1.0 site? Web 1.0 sites don’t decide to take entire days off. What, isn’t this like the second time YouTube’s gone down for a huge length of time? And this follows on MySpace going down earlier this month? And that follows on the great Flickr crash of July.
Hey, I know those tubes get clogged. I even did my own “tubes clogged” illustration for Flickr:
But c’mon. The times the old guard popular sites like Yahoo and Google have gone down for any significant length of time are few and far between — and usually for reasons outside their control.
I submit that Web 1.0 was all about being dependable while Web 2.0 is do the land grab and damn the dependability. Web 1.0 sites don’t require popping internet viagra to handle the traffic. Web 1.0 sites have stamina.
Seriously, I just got a release from comScore telling me that YouTube is now a top 50 site. I know my long years of being on the web are starting to hit at my memory, causing me to do dumb things like leave my Nintendo DS behind on my British Airways flight (have I mentioned that British Airways Lost Property sucks? Link it with me).
Still, I seem to recall that in the olden days when we plugged a modem into the wall and surfed at 56k and we were as happy as happy could be and had nine plain old planets and we liked it that way that top 50 sites stayed up. They didn’t crash. Sure, being Dugg as that Yahoo Cool Site Of The Day or being on NCSA What’s New might bring a little site to its knees. But big sites? Nah.
Maybe I’m remembering life all golden and happy. But in my happy olden world, popular sites maintained their popularity by staying up.
Postscript: Nice, Jason Calacanis says exactly the same thing. I swear, didn’t see his before I posted (and I doubt he saw mine). And I doubt we’re the only ones finding this common theme.
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