Vonage’s dashboard page has been down all morning. This is the place where all features of the service can be tweaked like voicemail, forwarding phones and so on. Fortunately this hasn’t been a deal killer for us today, but it reminds me of my increasing dependence on service levels for applications that live in the cloud (i.e., hosted applications served via the Internet).
More of my life is entangled with Google (Gmail; Reader; Notebook; Analytics) and when there is a hiccup with email specifically, much of my communication grinds to a halt.
This Vonage "upgrading" is bothersome since there isn’t any convenient way to perform tasks with Vonage offline (I could do it via the phone itself, but the help system is online!). Google Gears is interesting as is other offline use for other Web applications, but if you haven’t sync’ed recently and the hosted application goes offline, it’s a moot point.
About Steve Borsch
I’ve run into this same problem at school over the past three weeks as our server died and needed to be rebuilt (2X). Makes me more interested in ideas of access and making sure that kids can get the tools when they need them; and what the consequences are for learning when we can’t.