By John C. Dvorak
BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Everyone who is anyone wants some action in the upcoming IPO of Facebook Inc. This is despite the fact that nobody really understands Facebook, or what is actually a threat to its business.
I write this after reading various speculative articles about new services such as Pinterest, thought to be some sort of challenge to Facebook. People do not understand how easy it would be for Facebook to add a Pinterest-like feature to Facebook itself, or to embrace Pinterest in any number of ways. (You might want to do a little research on Pinterest to see what it is about, since it appears to be taking the Internet by storm. But I digress.)
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The real threat to Facebook is uptime. People are so linked to Facebook that they genuinely expect it to be available to them 24/7, with no lag time. This is going to be harder to achieve in the future.
I mention this because I heard some back-and-forth chatterings about how everyone at Facebook is preoccupied with uptime. Indeed, the No. 1 social network has admirable uptime and performance, given the belief that users will stray if outages started occurring.
I'm not sure that this is true, but it is possible that people who use Facebook as their so-called start page and portal might get annoyed if the service began to flake out. AOL Inc.
/quotes/zigman/577531/quotes/nls/aol AOL
-0.16%
had this sort of problem in its heyday. It was generally caused by upgrades to the system, which were only lab-tested.
This could also happen to Facebook, but more uncontrollable general outages might be a problem too, and I would expect to see these as more pressure is put on the Internet and on cloud-based services.
At any given time in the evening, some have estimated that Netflix Inc.
/quotes/zigman/87598/quotes/nls/nflx NFLX
+0.22%
and other video streams are taking up 75% of the Web's bandwidth and traffic. This number is not going down anytime soon. In fact, it could eventually overtake the Internet.
Back in mid-1990s, there were serious fears that the Net could not sustain the growth it was seeing. With the advent of streaming HD video and other bandwidth-sapping applications, we can expect more than a few catastrophic failures, if only locally.
These sorts of failures will, of course, affect more than Facebook. All sorts of businesses relying on online activity will be hurt. Any downtime lasting more than a few days could be disastrous.
While security analysts are worried that some onerous foreign government or entity is going to cyber-attack us and steal secrets or turn off the power grid, all they really have to do is shut down the Internet for a few days.
Imagine your day-to-day life with zero Internet for two whole days right in the middle of the week. Now think of what companies would be the most hurt.
Then short-sell those stocks right away. Oh wait, you can't get online to do anything. A shame.
There is your future. You've been warned.
/quotes/zigman/577531/quotes/nls/aol 
US
: NYSE Euronx
Volume: 861,097
April 5, 2012 4:00p
Rev. per Employee
$389,064
/quotes/zigman/87598/quotes/nls/nflx
US
: Nasdaq
Volume: 2.72M
April 5, 2012 4:00p
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