Amazon EC2 goes down, taking with it Reddit, Foursquare and Quora

Cloud computing issues bring down Social media sites Reddit, Foursquare, Quora and others due to Amazon Web Services suffering network latency and connectivity errors yesterday.

For those of you that don't know, including me, Cloud computing refers to the provision of computational resources on demand via a computer network. In the traditional model of computing, both data and software are fully contained on the user's computer; in cloud computing, the user's computer may contain almost no software or data (perhaps a minimal operating system and web browseronly), serving as little more than a display terminal for processes occurring on a network of computers far away.

Quora even has a fun ‘down’ message: “We’d point fingers, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without EC2.” And a funny YouTube video.

One of the sites that was down includes xtranormal, it has been down since yesterday. It's strange how we have come to expect for these sites to work all the time and when they don't it's a real disappointment. If a site is down to resolve issues and for maintenance, is it acceptable to you? Would you return to the site?

Access the full article here.

TED Launches their own Quora competition

TED, an organization that puts on short talks from important modern thinkers, announced their new Quora-like platform today. According to the article, “TED Conversations” will be a question and answer forum similar to Stack Overflow or Quora, but with a few important differences. Conversations will take three forums: questions, ideas and debates. They’ll also be assigned an expiration date between one day and two weeks from their start.

This could definitely be a way that the Quora model could succeed. As long as TED has a dedicated team of experts willing to answer questions, they may have found the answer to successful Quora-like system.

Link to the article:
http://mashable.com/2011/02/16/ted-conversations/

Link to TED:
http://www.ted.com

We're trusting thought leaders more and more

This article caught my eye because it reminded me of our Friday discussion about Quora, and how part of the appeal is that the answers are coming from "experts."  Basically, it gives a break-down of the key points from the annual Edelman Trust Barometer.
At the same time that we're trusting our online "friends" less, we're trusting online "credentialed experts" more - perhaps the explanation for Quora's (so-far) winning strategy.  If you attract knowledgeable individuals to review your product etc, your message will be more widely accepted, whereas people are now placing less trust in their online, non-credentialed "friends." 
These tools also make "experts" more accessible, whereas it used to be more difficult to find a knowledgeable voice. Ultimately, this gives us a good picture of how businesses are being forced to adapt and target these thought leaders, instead of spreading their message to every individual via social media.