GMail’s outage yesterday attracted a lot of attention, particularly from people who really rely on the e-mail service for their business and personal lives.
To get a better handle on how people reacted to GMail being unavaiable, we used MAP to focus on the sentiment before and after the outage.
On Monday (August 31), the social media conversations about GMail within 83% positive (44% positive and 39% neutral), while only 17% were negative.
Not surprisingly, GMail’s reputation has taken a major hit today (Sept. 2) as only 71% of total social media activity was positive (35% positive and 36% neutral), while negative conversations soared to 29% from 17%.
What’s particularly interesting is there are significantly more negative conversations happening within the U.K. (33%), compared with the U.S. (20%).
We also looked at the most common keywords within social media conversations. At the core was “outage” with strong links to “Google” and “IMAP” - Internet Message Access Protocol that lets you download messages from GMail’s servers to your computer to access e-mail.
For all the talk and excitement about cloud computing, it still surprises people when online services run into trouble.
