Well, this morning has been quite interesting.  I got home last night to log into ping.fm (which is where I centralize a lot of my channel management). I went to post a new item and noticed that all my feeds had disappeared. Now, I’ve been moving my online brand/identity over from arthurofsun to onlinematters (more on that soon), so I thought maybe I was logged into the wrong account. But then I realized I didn’t open a new account for ping.fm – just renamed the old one to my new username.

That’s when I noticed this message on the home page:

If you created your account between September 2nd and September 8th and you are unable to login, you will need to re-create your account. Sorry for this inconvenience! You can read more as to why by clicking here.

Turns out, the folks at ping.fm had a database server crash that lost six days of data. It so happened that I was setting up an entire channel architecture for our business on the 5th and 6th, so while my account wasn’t gone, my entire distribution network had been deleted. I had no clue this was happening, so all my posts yesterday went spinning off willy-nilly into the ether. Very frustrating to realize that I had no warning; no alerts. To boot, I’ve had the pleasure spending this morning reestablishing the entire ping.fm network.

The lesson in all of this is that social media, and its associated infrastructure, is still very young. If you depend on social media to make a living, then you should make a habit of double checking your feeds and channels on a regular basis to ensure they are still running correctly – that is, until a service comes along that allows you from a single console to manage, monitor, and repair your social media feeds (hint hint).

So instead of writing my blog this am, I was recreating the channel by which it can reach you. My apologies. We’ll be back tomorrow.