While being down with a flu after a recent trip to London, I've been poking around the flu trends online, came across Google's Flu Trends and thought that it was a pretty interesting service. I then also recalled that I had learned about this service from a recent announcement made about a similar service that was recently launched by Sermo.com and wanted to check out their services.
Sermo's PR machine has been on a roll lately with a lot of announcements which generated quite a bit of buzz about the company. One of such announcements was the following: Sermo, Taking a Page from Google, Creates Flu Tracker
In any case, an MD friend of mine had sent me a screenshot of what what Sermo's Flu tracker looks like for a Google comparison:
This made it apparent that Sermo is obviously still struggling with some technical challenges. Sermo had raised close to $40M to date and can obviously afford to hire a good development team and some quality assurance people. The fact that they've got their PR machine to announce this feature makes one think that they would ensure that things are running smoothly but go figure. Additionally, Sermo has a very small (but obviously very targeted) amount of website traffic so it not likely to be a scalability issue:
Hope the folks @ Sermo work out the bugs. It must be pretty embarrassing for them to shout about a new future at the top of their lungs and then have it crash on their users.
*cough*
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