Gmail was down for an unknown amount of time today. Judging by the talk on Twitter some people were still having issues several hours after Google said the problem had been fixed.

Managing user speculation

One way Google is countering the speculation that will undoubtedly arrive in the tracks of incidents like this is via its status page (screenshots below), where they quickly posted information to its users.

It’s always a good move to have some form of public status page when you run a large online service. This could be a status blog or a purpose-built website like the Google Apps Status Dashboard. This approach not only promotes transparency but also gives companies a central point of information to refer their users to.

That won’t stop people from talking, though.

The real-time, online discussion

The public, real-time discussion of service outages that take place on Twitter is interesting, and a testament to how people have become more or less dependent on Gmail and similar online services. In addition to this, Gmail has so many users that a large number of people will be affected even by brief outages (which they then talk about online).

It should be mentioned that this is in no way unique for Google or Gmail. To name a recent example, problems with the hosting provider Media Temple have been widely discussed on Twitter. Rich Miller over at Data Center Knowledge has posted an interesting article about how Media Temple’s customer service is dealing with this.

There are also a lot of people who use Twitter as an indicator to see if services are having problems. This whole “check on Twitter if others have the same problem as I am” is a pretty interesting phenomenon. We stumbled upon this tweet that sums it up nicely:

Social media sites like Twitter are rapidly becoming the go-to place for status information about large online services such as Gmail. A kind of crowdsourced error detection.

Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.

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Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.

There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

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Sometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.

Enter our new “report banners”.

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.

One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)

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The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

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