We've been noticing a trend that's been gaining traction over the year. It seems that more and more small businesses and entrepreneurs are turning to 3rd-party sites such as Facebook and Twitter to get their message out. They're relying heavily on these services to engage with their clients and to secure new business with potential customers. They're not just relying on them but actually depending on them. Unfortunately, there's a danger in depending on something for your livelihood that is so out of your control.

Everyone knows about Twitter's infamous "Fail Whale", a cutesy image that appears on Twitter's website whenever their service is over capacity which has been pretty frequent. Facebook, on the other hand, has experienced very little downtime for a website that has 500,000,000 registered users that generate a ton of traffic. That was until yesterday afternoon. Folks in the U.S. started experiencing flaky connectivity issues around Noon CDT. The problem continued to persist throughout the afternoon eventually bringing all of Facebook to its proverbial knees. Facebook was down for everyone as evidenced by the number of tweets on Twitter saying as much.

Now, if you look at some of those tweets you'll see a lot of messages similar to the one's that have been posted whenever someone using Twitter experiences the familiar "Fail Whale".

Our advice to businesses and entrepreneurs that are relying too much on Facebook and Twitter is to stop immediately and realize that these sites do not have your business interests in mind. Use these sites as a complement to your existing strategies to get your message out.

The next time you find yourself cursing when their sites go down, take that opportunity strengthen or build up your home base. Make sure you have a website that you can easily contribute to on a consistent basis and you'll rely less on things that can disappear at any time.