Gordon Brown's Number10 TV experienced some teething problems at it's launch, but the Prime Minister will be glad to hear that he's not alone.Last week, the popular (and free) web analytics tool Sitemeter was stopping sites from loading in Internet Explorer. Overnight millions of blogs and sites were not working - sites with huge readerships such as PerezHilton.com and Gizmodo.com.
The sites appeared to load until the browser tried to render the Sitemeter code when an "Operation Aborted" message would appear followed by a blank screen.
Sitemeter was fixed again quickly, the problems seem to have come about during upgrades to the service, but millions of users had already been affected and many sites had removed the Sitemeter code from their pages. How many of those are still using the Sitemeter service is unknown.
Earlier in the week, Google's online email service, Gmail, went down leaving millions of users unable to access their email. Blogs worldwide erupted over the matter and Google later made a public apology on its Gmail Blog after the problem had been fixed.
Gmail has had similar problems over the years since its launch. The complexity of the site's technology combined with the huge number of users using it make problems almost inevitable. The situation is comparable in Twitter and we're likely to see problems in other Web 2.0 sites in future. It's especially likely where the number of users grows substantially over a short space of time.
The unfortunate problems with these popular services might come as a relief to Prime Minister Gordon Brown - the pressure might be abated slightly by knowing that his techies are in good company. Downing Street attempted to launch a new area of the PM's website www.number10.gov.uk. Downing Street has described Number10 TV as part of an attempt to reach out to a wider public. The site was supposed to feature exclusive video coverage of the prime minister's speeches and media appearances but as yet has only had a plentiful supply of "404 page not found" pages.
A spokeswoman for the site said "It is just what happens when you launch a new website". Whilst this is not true and many issues can be avoided, it does also happen to huge, well-established international websites such as Google and Twitter.
Number10 TV is expected to be offline for another 48 hours but it is interesting to see that the government is embracing various social media services on its website. Flickr photos, YouTube video, Twitter, Facebook and Digg are all being utilised to good effect on the site.
In better news, king of downtime, Twitter received millions of Tweets from users complaining about the Gmail outage - and managed to stay online. That could be a sign that things are improving in a service which has been plagued by technical problems in the past.
