I’ve got a bit of a fondness of the custom “we’ll be right back” messages some sites post when they are temporarily down for maintenance.
Last year I pointed out “Bloglines’ Plumber”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2005/06/26/i-love-the-bloglines-plumber and this spring I pointed out super-apologetic “Backpack Error Messages”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/05/18/helpful-error-pages. Flickr’s downtime message is so popular it’s become a “meme”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/07/31/the-meme-epidemic-a-case-study onto itself (do a Google search on “is having a massage”:http://www.google.com/search?q=+%22is+having+a+massage%22 if you’re not hip to the jive).
So I was thrilled earlier this week when I hit “digg.com”:http://www.digg.com/ and found _their_ downtime message:
I really like how they turned their offline status into a content opportunity. People go to Digg to find something interesting to read, so this message is just about perfect from my perspective.