Thursday, October 2, 2008

Leadership During Downtime

When I browsed to LinkedIn early this morning, this is what showed up on a web page entitled "Oops!":

Sorry, we can't display this page right now.

Something unexpected has gone wrong. Please wait a few seconds and try again by hitting the reload button.

We apologize for the inconvenience. An error report has been filed and our team is working on fixing the problem.

If you have any questions, please email us at customer_service@linkedin.com.


For many developers and business users of web applications, this is an all-too-familiar sight when a web site is experiencing problems. But does it need to be?

LinkedIn is no doubt a leader in on-line networking and community. But while there is a link to contact customer service via email, the web page is pretty much out of character with the rest of the web site: no ads, no links to its user community's services and sites, no information about LinkedIn itself - in other words, nothing useful. We might as well have received the standard error page from the browser.

In a period of downtime, LinkedIn is missing out on an opportunity to continue leading the way as a premier networking and community portal. Just a few links and paragraphs of text can make all the difference, so that during downtime LinkedIn would never be completely offline.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just another in a long list of "secret" doings at the KGB of social networking sites...