We all know by now the internet’s not a truck, it’s a series of tubes. And it appears that Flickr has got its tubes chock full of material right now. Flickr has a knack for humorous error messages, and for its largest site outage in a long time, they’ve decided to give users something to do while the site is down.

I’ve read messages such as “flickr is getting a backrub” before; Flickr likes putting stuff like that. This is a much larger than average outage, though. For this, they’ve put a large image of the Flickr logo, sans color, and a note that you should print this page out, color it, and upload it with the tag “flickrcolourcontest” when Flickr goes back online for a chance to win a free Pro account. A nice spur-of-the-moment gesture.

All jokes aside, this is beginning to become an unnervingly long outage, and I’m not sure a little coloring project is enough to set my mind at ease. I’m sure the same think can be said for the legions of Flickr Pro users who have thousands of full-resolution photos archived on Flickr’s servers. According to the Flickr Blog, they’ve had a “temporary storage failure affecting a sizable chunk of old Flickr photos” and that they’re in the midst of moving a massive 20 terabytes of data to another data center. Any idea how long that takes?

Naturally, the Flickr blog assures users that their photos are absolutely safe–they even broke net etiquette and wrote it in all caps!–but the outage is a little worrisome, and I hope that after the matter, the fine folks at Flickr are able to give us a full disclosure as to what happened.

Also, for the record, I think that all that metadata attached to my Flickr photos is almost as valuable as the photos themselves, so I’ll end this post with an open suggestion to Flickr: Make an upload program that keeps all the tag and caption information as metadata, and let’s you sync the file with the copy on your computer; it could be Yahoo!/Flicrk’s answer to Google’s Picasa!

Update: The site is back up and everything seems to be working normally. I guess it’s time for people to start uploading their coloring projects now.

technorati tags: flickr, google, picasa, downtime, outage

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Filed under: humor, news, technology on July 19th, 2006