Yes, it was very impressive. I was hoping they would be successfull, because in a few weeks the next event will also require some interesting web site hosting. If it had worked, then the people who follow could just copy it. Even without a feed to push, the sites were unresponsive for parts of the day.
http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/99/140268.html
I'm very concerned we still haven't proven we know how to handle big event sites on the Internet.
performance of most of the mirrored sites of mars.jpl.nasa.gov, as well as: www.marspolarlander.com www.livefrommars.com www.planetary.org a few others i can't remember now was really, really bad most of the day. pulling up 300kb/s or even 28.8kb/s video from broadcast.com was horrible with several minutes time to "sync" with nearly still control room video. (i'm blaming sites as opposed to network because pings and traceroutes really didn't look bad at all from where i was sitting) i had really expected they prepared for this in a big way. if nasa had gotten contact the first time and actually had video, stills, and audio to distribute, i personally believe it would have all melted down. i don't think it was so much network problems as server/web/application problems. pages came up blank many times, servers said "too may users", etc. i think we haven't proven we know how to handle server/os/application development on the net as opposed to networks that scale. -brett