Yesterday, Twitter, Facebook, and few other social sites were affected by a distributed denial of service attack, causing the services to become sluggish at best and completely non-responsive at worst.  The online response was immediate as social-media junkies everywhere cried out in agony as they were forced to use less trendy communication tools such as phones, blogs, and email. While that must have been painful, it could have been worse, especially for the businesses who rely on those sites for their traffic.

That made us think about the wisdom of diversification. Social media is a hot topic right now, especially in recruiting. There’s no denying that these sites are full of opportunities for recruiters, opportunities that they should certainly pursue. But this attack reminds us that the web has limitations and dependencies, both real and virtual. Putting our eggs in just one or two baskets can leave us exposed when problems arise.

In our last post we talked about the traffic monster that is Google and how it would be silly to ignore it. While that is true, it is important to remember that Google can be a fickle beast. Many a site has seen their traffic drop to nothing as their top rankings suddenly sank to the bottom of the pile. A single-minded focus on getting top organic rankings on Google left those sites, and by extention their businesses, open to disaster. Likewise, linking all of your advertising/pr/sales/customer communication or whatever else to a specific social site is asking for trouble.

While it may involve more work to diversify, it would be foolish to do otherwise. For all we know, Twitter could be gone tomorrow.