Early yesterday afternoon, Twitter had issues with connectivity. Twitter members can attest that they were going bonkers when service was down for 2 hours. 2 hours? You're not asleep and you can't send a tweet for 2 hours? Either we're serious addicts or we're just serious addicts. It wasn't until the infamous Mashable blog announced that Twitter and Facebook were under heavy attack by the dreaded DDOS.
So what the heck is a DDOS attack? Well according to Wikipedia, "A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users." In lamens terms, when a site receives a DDOS attack, you, the web surfer, can't surf the attacked site. Pretty ironic seeing that around the same week, we hear reports that Myspace's popularity has dwindled and that their cutting about 30% of its workforce. Bummer. So what better way to stay in the race by stealing the traffic from Twitter and Facebook and give users an alternative. Makes sense right? Let's be honest, of course Myspace wouldn't really take responsibility for the attack, but wouldn't it be funny if disgruntled Myspace employees, including Tom himself, attacked the "pop sites" to make their employment seem useful?
Let's go a little deeper. I'm sure like TV shows, sites at times jump the shark and then they are considered obsolete and unpopular. What was Myspace's reason? Was it when they were sold to News Corp for $327 million? The same parent company to conservative news channel Fox News. Maybe people were just annoyed by Tom; I know I was.
Whatever the case may be, Myspace as reckoning force is over. Users are now finding other ways to connect to people rather than spend time building Myspace pages for people to leave comments. With Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and even Youtube (MySpace's video nemisis) becoming more interactive, Myspace honestly doesn't stand a chance of survival.
In conclusion, applications like TweetDeck, UberTwitter and URL shortner bit.ly may be having API issues with Twitter since the attack, and Twitter itself is staggering like a boxer that gets up at the 9th count before being K.O.'ed. But unless News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch decides to liquidate his asset and sell Myspace to a dominating web powerhouse like Google, these dominant social media outlets will continue to be popular; or will they soon to jump the shark too? Only time will tell...
