Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I got an extremely clever personalized spam email today, something that I’ve never seen before. They took my first name and used it to address me, and then took my last name and suggested I “move the Back family there.” Wow! Check this out:

From Homes4Half [info@lafdeb.com]
date Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 6:24 PM
subject A Half-priced Home in ITHACA for the Backs

Dear Elliott,

Imagine moving the Back family into a fabulous new home in the ITHACA area that you bought for HALF it’s market value! You can find homes priced as LOW as $10,000. Search the ITHACA area for the best bargains today!

They even spelled my name right, which is fairly amazing.

My favorite blog in the world has a post about the year to date downtime of various social networks which is revealing. Not a single one achieves the famous “three nines” uptime SLA (although Amazon’s S3 service offers a two nines 99.99% uptime guarantee).

Yahoo 360 isn’t a real social network, but it had great uptime

The best of these is Yahoo 360, with 99.9938% uptime over the last two months, followed by Myspace (99.969%), Facebook (99.8822%), Linked In (99.7024%), and finally Windows Live (99.4482%). MySpace was only down for 25m, while MSN Live Spaces had an embarrassing 7hrs 25m of downtime.

This is cool. Uptime monitoring company Pingdom has released a tool and widget for monitoring the Apple store:

Now you don’t have to wait for blogs to post about when the Apple store is down, you can just check their awesome service. Apple is interesting in that they take their online store offline to update it with new products; in that regard, it’s cutely old-fashioned. This year, changes in the Apple store brought us the new iPhones, the Macbook Air, and new Shuffle prices.