Zuckerberg's attempt at praising a mobile app for Facebook integration exposes an ill-prepared website.
At 10:31 p.m. on Sunday evening, Mark Zuckerberg updated his Facebook status. He was grilling a steak, and noticed that the iOS app he was using to monitor the meat’s temperature had integrated Facebook to inform users’ Friends what they were cooking. Having become excited by the discovery that the site he founded had organically popped up in a product he was using, he wanted to inform his 15.5 million subscribers about it.
I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome. I’m making a Fred’s steak.
The app, called iGrill, is run by a small Connecticut-based company called iDevices, the CEO of which told the Hartford Courant that Facebook integration was supposed to be a “quiet release.” By 10:33 p.m. that night, a commenter replied to Zuckerberg’s status, reporting that the website was down due to overwhelming traffic. He was telling the truth.
“We were caught totally off guard by Mark Zuckerberg’s post and the immediate influx of traffic,” Chris Allen, the CEO of iDevices, said, according to the Courant. “We had quietly released this update for our users earlier this month and were waiting for it to gain traction, but this obviously gives us a huge head start.”
According to the report, iDevices incorporated additional servers and bandwidth to stay online. Also, although he said he would welcome the opportunity if Zuckerberg was interested, Allen denied rumors that Zuckerberg was investing in the company and had simply used Facebook for his own profit.
We can only hope Zuck does decide to invest some money into iGrill, if only so the Facebook integration means fewer people will post photos of their meals.
