The Twitter-Facebook-RSS single point of failure

So Twitter and Facebook got hit by DDOS attacks today.

Then I read that reports are pointing to problems between Russia and Georgia as the source of the problem? Yikes. I guess even the locals there need their Twitt-FB time.

Single Point Of Failure?

The first thing that struck me though was not actually the attack, but what it reveals. In this case Twitter and Facebook being like a single point of failure. In my opinion, they have become like binary star system. They provide different services but more and more they are becoming the defacto social links on web pages. As a result people have become to rely on them like email as a communications medium to use in daily life. That makes it particularly nasty when they fall to an attack like today's. 

And Then There Were Three

RSS has been around for quite a while but as more individuals migrate to CMS based web systems, with their built in RSS feed capabilities,  the platform itself becomes more widely utilized. Consequently I see on sites, including this one, the three basic Social Links: Twitter, Facebook, RSS.  As Digg and Delicious try to reinvent themselves with mixed results (Digg article, Delicious article) the speed of the transformation away from what made them relevant just a few years ago is, to me, amazing.

Each service is complementary to the others and you wouldn't necessarily want all three services to be provided by one global entity or company. For instance, you might blog and have it feed out through RSS links, but maybe you wouldn't necessarily want it to also populate your FB and Twitter pages.

Or, since Facebook is based on networking with people you know vs. Twitter being based on networking with people you possibly don't know, nor especially want to know, you don't necessarily want to keep them updated with the same content.

Anti Consolidation?

So while you may not want all services provided under a company umbrella of someone else's design, you will probably end up doing it for yourself. I've learned this myself with Facebook. My account now encompasses friends and family spanning decades and different periods of life. Its become difficult to post anything that I feel would be relevant for everyone. As a result you end up posting watered down, diluted material.  Sometimes consolation isn't the best thing.

Hootsuite has a tool that addresses this for Twitter. By being able to aggregate multiple Twitter accounts with top level tools to make sending and receiving from multiple accounts easy, to me they've broken ground on this.

Your View

So where do you stand on all this?