I admit it - I’m a Facebookaholic! I tend to check my Facebook (hereafter referred to FB!) account more times than is healthy and I feel slightly dissppointed when I have no notifications or there are no invites waiting to invite me to add the (supposedly) latest and greatest FB apps. I’ve got back in touch with people I haven’t spoken to for almost 17 years, something that Friends Reunited couldn’t do, but with FB I found them, added them and sent them a message within a couple of days of signing up. However, I’m starting to feel dissappointed with FB.

Last week I tried logging into FB as usual, and was greeted with a message saying that I couldn’t log in at this time due to system maintenance and that I should try again later. I should add that I’ve seen this message before, and within a minute or two I was allowed into FB, changing my status and buying people virtual drinks. However, this time was different. I tried five minutes later - nothing. Twenty minutes later - nada. I tried two hours after that when I got to work - still the same. And all evening I was blocked out. I was starting to get worried; had I been hacked or had someone tried to get my account deleted, or had my account just disappeared from their database. Even more worrying was that when someone tried to access my FB profile it didn’t exist!!! I was a virtual ghost!

Finally, more than 24 hours after my first failed attempt, FB let me back into my account. I breathed a sigh, but my relief turned to shock as I discovered my event feed was empty. So it appears event feeds are not created on the fly, but separately for each person, which seems a silly way of doing it it me. Therefore I’d missed out on at least 24 hours of (what turned out to be) not particularly important events, but they could have been! I’ve grown to really like FB and I’ve defended it (especially because its the anti-MySpace) against non-believers. But this has shaken my confidence.

And now, this morning, I had more login problems. It kept timing out. It took 14 attempts before FB let me in. I had almost given up. I looked at the Help section and the only slight possible hint it gave was that my cookies were disabled, but my system hadn’t changed from when I’d logged on yesterday, and other cookie-dependent sites were fine.

Its no surprise or secret that FB has become massively successful. Since opening their system to third party applications, the site has mushroomed in popularity. Compete have published a report analysing the performance of MySpace vs Facebook, and confirms what we already know - FB is closing the gap. MySpace’s growth is slowing and FB is gaining - -20% vs +5%. This is great, but are the problems I’ve been experiencing lately a sign that FB are struggling with their accelerated growth? I know they need to expand their infrastructure and that 100% uptime is probably unachievable for every single account, but there is only so long people will put up with an unreliable site. I’ve also been having more and more problems with third-party apps on the site - probably not Facebook’s fault, but another niggle that needs sorting out.

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