Foursquare is a social networking application which provides location based service. If you are a foursquare user then you can check in using a mobile website, text messaging or a device based specification. This service was launched last year by Naveen selvadurai and Danis Crowley. You can also integrate it with Facebook and Twitter. After launched in 2009 it is only growing bigger, despite the presence of bigger players like Google and Facebook. Foursquare people use Shard to maintain the database that allows data to be stored rows rather than columns. They found some problem in the previous technique and try to install new shard. But the new shard took over entire service and each time they reload the new one, the original shard kept overloading and down the system.
Now Foursquare is growing bigger and it seems to be in the position to choose their destiny i.e. in which they want to move on. Now they can go ahead as an independent company and settle down all the details. Now a days, Twitter is very famous for its downtime and when you will visit the official site you can see number of posts and status update about recent downtimes.
Google and Amazon provides different page for status update and feedback. The downtime incidents are becoming regular these days and Common to all these services, previous downtime issues that hit the community hard. Most of the companies are not serious on this issue; the truth is until they get a big downtime they do not consider the issue seriously. But all these downtime issues only affect their status and system integrity. But the problem is that despite their great efforts some never get over this and the problem continues.
Location based services are very hot in market today and Foursquare is one of them. Foursquare cannot afford to be down for 11 hours. This downtime can be too costly for them as the market is very volatile and you will have to stay in the market. If Foursquare does not take the issue seriously and continues to down, then there are no doubts that they will fall behind in the market especially when your competitor is Facebook place. Facebook also saw downtime in recent years but they showed lot of reliability and character and now the problem is tackled by them. So it is very necessary for Foursquare to tackle the issue very seriously and make sure that the incidents like this will never happen in the future. From my personal experience I love to use Foursquare, but due to good reliability I am using Facebook places more often now. In Foursquare, sometimes the application does not refresh properly or they take so much time to locate the area. And I think that reliability is a big factor in the market especially when you have to attract the customer.
