The Only Tool You Will Ever Need to Eliminate Social Media Platform Outage Worries.
The recent Gmail and Facebook outages (which also affected Instagram and WhatsApp) was a shocking reminder of how reliant we are on these pervasive social platforms. And it also drove home one simple truth: For the general internet, stability is a myth.
The last time a major Facebook outage occurred was in 2008 when the platform boasted a mere 150 million users. This most recent outage asks us to reflect on just how far we’ve come; today Facebook has around 2.3 billion monthly users who could potentially be affected by an outage. Gmail now has over 1.5 billion. These two platforms power many of our business and personal interactions.
That that means millions of users were not be able to upload content or transact many types of business for the duration of the outage.
With each passing year our online lives become impossible to separate from both personal and professional priorities. And as our dependence grows, instances of outage or interruption threaten increasingly debilitating outcomes.
The Problem That Will Spark the Innovation
It’s not just the prospect of one or two platforms slowing down or going down altogether for a time that should concern us.
While worries that larger-scale and more comprehensive outages could create an apocalyptic situation reminiscent of this 2008 episode of South Park — a parody of The Grapes of Wrath — are likely overblown, instances of widespread unavailability, like those that occurred last week, reflect an urgent need for innovation.
As of the end of 2013, there are more tablets, smartphones and other internet-dependent gadgets on the planet than there are humans. Faster and more powerful devices are producing and consuming a glut of ever-increasing content: Case in point, we are contributing to the bulk right this moment in writing this blog.
A looming issue here is that while the content keeps on coming, the networking structure that supports it all has a finite capacity, leaving many around the globe Y2K-level concerned about what will happen when we approach the limit.
While cumbersome short-term solutions like laying extra cables across the Atlantic and optimizing bandwidth use can help to delay the inevitable, the problem of finite internet capacity — and the possibility of slowdowns and outages happening as we push the limits of this capacity — is one that calls urgently for innovation.
Small businesses and micro-influencers who rely on social media platforms to conduct their business will be among those most heavily impacted by outages of any type or length. The loss of one or two days — or even just a few hours — can have a far more devastating impact on the bottom lines of solopreneurs and micro-influencers than they do on the overall profits of larger concerns.
The crux of the problem with conventional platforms is that there is always one centralized point — the database — that is vulnerable to issues; issues caused by human error, system overload or attack, and many other dangers. If an issue occurs at this one vulnerable point, widespread outages can happen far too easily.
Distributed Ledger Is Best for Influencers and Small Businesses
While distributed ledger technology, or blockchain, is not invulnerable to the issues that so frequently plague conventional, centralized databases, like overload, data loss and attack, it operates on an entirely distributed model with no single point of failure, making it far less vulnerable.
FB had to take to Twitter last week to quash conspiracy theories about a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack while still attempting to get to the root of what caused the outage problem, finally confirming Thursday that a server configuration change had caused the issues.
A DDoS attack on a blockchain database, while not impossible, would certainly be less of a ready fear. Such an attack would require the hacker to identify the nodes — or computers — in the database and disable enough of those nodes to keep the database from reaching the consensus need to approve transactions. This becomes a with any database.
We are still a good way away from the version of Web 3.0, aka “the new internet,” where the internet and blockchain meld together to become a single entity. When it happens, this new internet will address the problems of centralization but Web 3.0 is still pretty far in the future.
The good news is that the seeds of this change already exist. The innovations that will drive the mass adoption of these newer, decentralized technologies are already in play and can be used to excellent advantage, especially by influencers and smaller businesses who are the most vulnerable to setbacks and losses when platform outages happen.
Small businesses, solopreneurs and influencers can seek out inventive companies like dApp (decentralized application) marketplace BOOSTO, which offers a decentralized platform where they can choose dApps that cater to their specific needs as a brand, and gather them together into an online “store” that is ideal for their business. Influencers can choose from available dApps, or partner with a developer to make something brand new, allowing the influencer or small business owner to essentially design their own social media platforms.
Blockchain-based platforms are simply safer, especially for small businesses since they can run polls, deploy marketing campaigns, sell products and engage with customers all in one location, in ways that would have required multiple conventional platforms. More platforms means more possibilities for inconvenient outages. Small businesses and solo concerns also save money in bypassing pricey third parties like selling platforms.
Blockchain is famously safe for businesses and consumers because of its trustworthy, decentralized environment, where transactions are securely made through the use of smart contracts.
Finally, the threat of widespread outages that derail business and stall sales, like the ones that happened to Google and Facebook users last week, are virtually nonexistent on a blockchain platform. This makes blockchain an extra smart choice for micro-influencers and solopreneuers who simply can’t afford to be offline for a single day.
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