One Does Not Simply "Connect" from Sodetel

After having seen their promos and heard some good words about them, I wanted to check out the website for "Connect" one of the new ISPs in Lebanon.
As I sat there waiting for their www.connect.net.lb site to load, my initial thoughts were mostly skepticism about how good they are if their website was taking that long to load.

When the browser eventually gave up and gave me an error I quickly resorted to smartphone and tried to open the site. You guessed it folks, the site loaded like a charm and it it was responsive, something that other well established ISPs seem oblivious to.

Laptop via Sodetel

Smartphone via Alfa

Wanting to rule out any issue on my own wifi, I did the usual restart on my router and laptop but things were the same. It was when I asked friends from different ISP connections to try out the link that the truth became obvious.

Connect's website was exclusively inaccessible from Sodetel's DSL connection. The reason behind this issue is still unknown.

 I will not jump to any conclusion here but one cannot but wonder why from all the sites out there Sodetel's connection just won't let open that new competitor.

Update - Time: 14:25
After a Sodetel representative reached out an hour ago asking about the details of the issue and assuring it was opening normally from his end, it seems that the site is now accessible.

Update Time: 14:35
ok stop the press people, I spoke too soon and the site is again unreachable. This could be an indicator of someone working to fix the issue or some other deep rooted issues with their DNS, routing or Cache Engine.

Facebook Launches Instagram Connect for Select Pages

I am sure many of you are already familiar with the twitter connect inside Facebook which allows you to connect your business page to a corresponding twitter account by visiting this page: facebook.com/twitter

With the rise in Instagram's popularity and after it was acquired by Facebook a question lingered on on whether deeper integration was going to happen. This question is still hanging although we saw several areas where the knowledge exchange took place. Brand, however, were still obliged to jump through several hoops inside the Instagram app to connect and share to the brand with no equivalent to the Twitter connect page (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiq43A0v6-s) .

A few days ago, while accessing one of the page that we manage, I was surprised by a prompt that appeared on top of the page inviting me to click to link the client's Instagram to the Business Page.

I followed the link and landed on this page:

The Connect Page with the client's page name hidden

The page is accessible via the following link: https://www.facebook.com/pages/instagram/
At the very bottom was the client's page name listed next to the "Connect to Instagram" button but I have chosen to obscure that name for the time being.

Interestingly enough the link is not generally accessible and other pages could not be connected to Instagram using this technique. When asking a friend who shares no common pages with me to try the link out he obtained the standard Facebook 404 page not found.

My best guess is that Facebook is rolling out this feature as part of an A/B test or for select high profile pages. I should mention that this specific client has well over one million fans with a very high engagement rate.

We have reached out asking some more info from a Facebook representative, no answer has been received yet.

Have you also encountered this? Did you connect your Instagram? Let me know in the comments.