Does the page load up as blank? Stop loading halfway through? Very difficult for WashPost to achieve high availability when they only control a portion of the experience.
When it's not linked properly (as far as I know most of those 3rd party services by default advertise the "wrong" way) - not only it would display a blank or half-blank page when the 3rd party service is down, also all the page loads are noticeably slower for everyone on every page load.
I.e. I use neither facebook nor twitter nor google+, but half of the internet is loaded a few hundred milliseconds slower because every page is crammed with their fairly useless buttons.
Why useless? First, that functionality should be part of the browser, not of the webpage. I should have a share button in my browser, for every page I see, and also it would prevent those services from tracking me.
Is there an firefox/chrome extension that:
- Provides Like, Tweet, +1, Digg and all the buttons in the toolbar (only ones I need)
- Prevents browser from accessing button embeds therefore disabling tracking?
I would install it in a heartbeat.
This is why I prefer a bookmarklet, for the specific (of the 100s possible) social sharing site I happen to like to use.