Wow. Just wow.

We knew that this year's Summer Olympics were going to be completely different than years past with the enormous amount of growth on the social media platforms. The last time we watched the Summer Games (2008), very few people were actively on Twitter and Facebook. According to this TechCrunch report, just over 1 million users at the end of April, 2008. Fast forward to 2012 and the number of Twitter users is around 500 million—a huge growth by any standards.

With that kind of increase in usage, one would think that the planning committee for the 2012 Games would have added it to their check list of things to consider. Apparently, they didn't considering the train wrecks we've witnessed so far.

First it was the IOC's attempt at controlling what the athletes could and couldn't do on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. I get this. The Olympics is a brand and the brand must be protected. We've seen plenty of athletes that have "goofed" on social media, and since they're attached to a brand (aka team), it goes from flying under the radar to becoming a full-blown PR nightmare. The 2012 Games had not even started before the first athlete to be ejected from the games due to an inappropriate tweet occurred. Yesterday, another one sealed his fate by not controlling his tongue—or rather thumbs.

Late Sunday evening, the IOC actually took to the crowds to ask them to stop tweeting so much. It appears that all that tweeting during the Men's Cycling event bogged down their GPS systems and prevented the reporters from transmitting correct information. The IOC has even upped that request to ONLY tweet if it's urgent. Mr. IOC President, I highly doubt that is going to happen.

This is something they should have anticipated long before the games began. The number of people who signed up for new Twitter accounts just so they could follow the Olympics should have been enough to give them pause. Was there no consultant or staff member who considered that Twitter alone was going to weigh the communications infrastructure down? I could be locked in a room and know when something major happens in the world just by how slow Twitter becomes.

But now it's not just the IOC that is getting some heat about Twitter. Twitter, itself, is now under fire for outing a journalist to NBC for his tweet-rant over how NBC was handling the Olympics. Guy Young was tweeting his VERY vocal opinions (as many of us were), and they weren't very positive towards NBC. Where he crossed the line, according to Twitter, is that he tweeted out the email address of the NBC executive overseeing the Olympic coverage and ended up getting suspended from Twitter. Tweeting out someone's personal contact or financial information using Twitter is very much a no-no, they told him. But for Twitter to turn over his information to NBC should be as well, right? I think many of us wonder that if there weren't a relationship between NBC and Twitter, this never would have transpired. Now both companies are being lambasted for "censorship."

All this and it's just the 5th day!

There are so many moving parts to these stories that it's almost impossible to keep up with. The IOC tried to keep the athletes from bringing embarrassment to the games with their use of social media, so it's a bit ironic that it is now NBC, Twitter, and the IOC themselves coming under fire for how they are handling the situations.

After the last medal is given and the flame is extinguished in London, the IOC will gather to discuss all the details of the 2012 Summer Games. It is my hope that they will devote a lot of time talking about the hiccups that happened and putting a much better plan for handling social media, time delays, and hashtags in place for the 2014 Winter Games.

Because all of us know that once you let that Genie out of the bottle, you're not putting her back in.