Last night I went to Channel4′s 4oD service to watch a tv show – but I couldn’t watch any of their content.
Sure, I was presented with a tantalising list of episodes, but there weren’t any play buttons – so I couldn’t make any use of Channel 4′s (very cool) site.
Suddenly it hit me, what if they were drawing the play buttons with javascript. Javascript is single-threaded, so a single script mis-behaving can stop the whole of the rest of the page from working.
Sure enough, looking at the site carefully it turned out they are including Facebook connect. The Facebook servers were responding incredibly slowly, but failing to respond with a server error that would let the rest of the site run.
So in short, the whole of channel 4′s 4oD site was useless to me (and, I assume to a large number of other people) because of Facebook.
Now I don’t know if Channel 4 have any kind of SLA with Facebook (I’m assuming not), but I’d be interested to know if there was a risk analysis done when they added Facebook Connect to the site.
Sorry you were unable to watch 4oD last night and thanks for the useful information. We’ll take it on board and hopefully be able to improve the experience for all our users.
No problem – thanks for responding so fast!
4oD is a great service – Ironically I took part in one of your surveys a few days ago and I think I mentioned sometimes getting missing play buttons, but I hadn’t spotted what was causing it for me at the time.
That answers my question