Techcrunch reports that Digg.com suffered at least two hours of downtime yesterday. Today, Digg’s response was extremely sluggish and according to my browser (see screenshot on the right), the bottleneck was a server called hitbox.com, which seems to belong to WebSideStory, a company that provides visitor analytics among other services.

I’m currently using Google’s Analytics service to analyze user traffic on various sites, am experimenting with using Photobucket to serve up the images on this blog and rely on Snap.com to give link previews.

More and more blogs and sites are relying on these kind of backend mash-ups. Digg’s problem with their analytics provider highlights the risk of outsourcing too many features of a business critical site to outside parties.

ps. When I was trying to find the Techcrunch post regarding Digg, I was held up by… you guessed it: The Google Analytics server.

Update: In an interview on TalkCrunch, the Digg team gives an obvious explanation to outsourcing their analytics. Because their business model relies on ads, their customers have to get a third party to tell them how much traffic the site actually gets.

A recent entry on the SmugMug blog, Amazon S3: Show me the money, (via Steve Eichert) highlights the advantages of outsourcing IT infrastructure needs to Amazon’s S3 services.

In short, using Amazon’s webservices is saving SmugMug $500,000 a year.

Businessweek covered Amazon’s web service strategy recently in Amazon’s Risky Bet.

According to Businessweek, Wall Street wants Amazon to just continue selling stuff and stop spending money on crazy IT ideas. SmugMug probably disagrees.

I’ve just enabled link previews from Snap via a wordpress plugin. When the mouse hovers over a link on this blog, an image preview is shown. This is one of the better browsing experience enhancements I’ve seen in a while.

The fact that they have a link to their site on every preview is a clever and powerful viral marketing technique.

In the US, the telecoms have been lobbying for congress to pass a bill that would allow them to charge extra fees to guarantee that certain Web sites run faster than others instead of treating all packets of Web information the same regardless of their content.

This bill now seems to have fizzled out according to the Save the Internet Blog: “Huge Victory for Real People as Telco Bill Dies“.

Obviously, the Save the Internet blog is not the most neutral of sources on Net Neutrality, but the demise of this bill seems nevertheless to be fortunate for the web’s future.

At the very least, net neutrality levels the playing field for small Internet start-ups that don’t have big bucks to pay the telco’s to ensure that their data packets are equal to Google’s.

Flock, “the social web browser”, got a lot of attention (or hype) when the web 2.0 term was starting to get traction. The most recent release is 0.7.8 so it is still in beta.

I haven’t had a look at Flock until now and my first reaction is very positive. It somehow feels like so much more than a browser. Apart from its super slick branding on every front (although even the Flock team can’t make a myspace page look good) the browser seems to bring “the web as a platform” one step closer.

When a MySql developer was once asked about innovation he answered that it was easy, Oracle’s feature list was MySql’s to-do list. It’s easy to innovate when your catching up.

Opera is no longer the only Oracle of the web experience. Now, Flock and Opera will give the preview of what will be included next in Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Explorer.

The European edition of Time magazine has a feature on 60 years of “heroes”. Along with Margaret Thatcher, Coco Chanel and Nelson Mandela they list Linus Torvalds in the category “Rebels and Leaders”. The list also includes The Beatles under the category “Culture and Business”.

I would have liked to sit in on the meeting when they compiled that list.