The last few days have seen quite a few events that give rise to skepticism about the Cloud and the Social Websites.
- Â Linkedn says display of tweets in user’s profile no longer possible due to a limitation imposed by Twitter -Â http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-linkedin-partnership-2012-6
- The supposedly all pervasive and ubiquitous AWS cloud got punctured taking down Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram and many other services down with it. http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/30/there-goes-the-weekend-pinterest-instagram-and-netflix-down-due-to-aws-outage/
- Facebook in an attempt to push its email usage screwed up their implementation and in the process got its users annoyed and frustrated. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57464415-93/facebook-e-mail-mess-address-books-altered-e-mail-lost/
Now, these social networks and services do not work in isolation like the Yahoo, Aols of the yesteryears. There are a lot of startups, companies, other services who have based their critical infrastructure on these services whether paid or unpaid.
The lesson that is obvious from these repeatedly occurring natural or forced disruptions  is that their users need to maintain a certain amount of healthy skepticism and also should keep looking beyond these services.