$15bn-Facebook are also quite cavalier about making changes midweek – they seem to do midweek ‘pushes’ to their production server that they frequently have to back out or subsequently apologise for. Some of the posts to their platform status feed read like a car crash.

Both could both learn a thing or two from mission critical SaaS service providers like Salesforce who figured out a long time ago that trust is the key to building and operating a successful online service (though in Facebook’s case other issues may be eroding end-user trust).

Salesforce place so much emphasis on trust that they put considerable effort into building and naming an operations website called http://trust.salesforce.com/. They use it to announce things like scheduled maintenance well in advance. Oh, Salesforce scheduled maintenance is always is done at weekends.

Doing silly things like taking your service offline for a day in the middle of the week, when most of your users will be online, erodes trust.