Random ramblings

  WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook? Which is the most popular of them all?   The last couple of months have been quiet and uninteresting. At least, there was nothing that I could get myself to write about. All that changed 36 hours ago when I realised that I couldn’t reply to a WhatsApp message. You all know the rest of the story. I have to admit that I briefly delighted in the irony that a tech giant had been felled by something as trivial as a DNS error , that most annoying of issues ordinary folks like us face all the time. Once I shook off the schadenfreude , it struck me that I had the opportunity here to study the revealed preferences of three and a half billion people worldwide, for the 3 most used social media services on earth (other than YouTube)! The largest imaginable research project! And all funded by Facebook! (At least 6 billion dollars, I am told). So, I hurriedly finished some pending (real) work, and here I am.   Insights from an outage The first...