Today, the Daily Mail, UK’s 2nd biggest-selling newspaper made a boo boo by quoting a parody Twitter account, thinking it was the REAL Steve Jobs. Many of us who spend copious amounts of time on Twitter are familiar with the popular @ceoSteveJobs account that spews lots of funny one-liners aimed to poke fun at all-things-Apple.

So, what did the parody account say? Just 13 simple words.

We may have to recall the new iPhone. This, I did not expect. – @ceoSteveJobs

Then, the Daily Mail went on to publish the following news piece online.

I can only imagine how embarrassing it must be for the newspaper, when the entire twittersphere picked up on their mistake and started *rolling their eyes* at the gross misreporting.

Soon after, the article was pulled from the Daily Mail, but a copy still remains here at TheBackpackr.com – read it, if you wish. At the same time, a seemingly similar post (view here) with the same imagery was found on the Daily Mail, though dated earlier. Bizarre.

• Timesheets of staff at our digital agency, Integricity
• IT maintenance record logs between our technology boys and the clients
• Finance reporting for certain projects involving various stakeholders
• Self-generation of monthly statements for certain client services
• Holiday itinerary planning between friends

It’s truly revolutionized the way we can be efficient now. Though there is still quite a fair bit that I desire out of Google docs (spreadsheets), such as the ability to control which sheets can be viewed by different parties, locking of certain cells, ability to link between spreadsheets, it’s made it a joy to work.

Today, I noticed a huge notice that states new ways to share your documents (though I saw the functionality several days ago already).

The full list of functionality is written up here by Google themselves but in summary…

• Private: only the creator can view it and people who are specifically invited
• People at your domain with the link: you are part of the same domain (e.g. xyz@thebackpackr.com) and are aware of the link to the document
• Your domain: anyone with a Google acccount with the same domain – you need not know the link to the document
• Anyone with the link: it’s self-explanatory – you have the link, you can access it. Be careful not to allow edit privileges, if you don’t want the data changed by Mr Anonymous!
• Public on the web: I have no need for this, but you may for whatever reason. This document can be searched and listed in Google search results

We’ve just found out via Twitter engineer (@jeanpaul) that the cause of these outages is primarily due to internal sub-networks being over-capacity. He outlines 3 problems and 3 solutions for them. (Read the source article here)

3 PROBLEMS

1. Two critical, fast-growing, high-bandwith components were put on the same segment of the internal
2. The Twitter internal network wasn’t monitored appropriately.
3. Their internal network was temporarily misconfigured.

3 SOLUTIONS

1. Twitter has doubled the capacity of the internal network.
2. They’re improving the monitoring of the internal network.
3. Twitter is rebalancing the traffic on the internal network to redistribute the load.

In case you didn’t know, Twitter has also launched a pretty funky feature to commemorate the World Cup season. It has special pages that filter World Cup related tweets from both teams in play and display them to the audience, LIVE. You can take a look at it here. This surely increases the traffic to Twitter exponentially!

RANDOM FAIL WHALE INFO…

Some enterprising individuals have redrawn variants of the fail whale as shown below. Pretty nifty, huh?

Related articles: High Error Rate on Twitter.com, A Perfect Storm of Whales

To show you what some sites have done for their fan pages, here’s a cool website called Facebook Showcase that highlights what’s cool out there. You can even submit your fan page if you think you’re cool enough.