71–80 of 195 posts
hey Mark, if you need server capacity I can set you up with four machines on very short notice, let me know. j@ww.com (no charge, help you handle the spike and see if it has staying power without having to get in to long term contracts).
I recently built a Facebook application that approached the same kind of growth. Sites like this typically see eCPM between $0.10 and $0.30 for advertising. So you're looking at around $30/day revenue right now. Consider switching to EC2. This will allow you to easily scale up to a more powerful server if growth continues or down to a less powerful one if traffic tapers off. Depending on how you set things up, a comm…
Would it be possible to see your Facebook app? I'm curious to see what traits these fast growing apps have in common in person.
In general the biggest trait is that the app is built around sharing. Apps where sharing is a secondary feature generally do much worse in comparison to those where the whole point of the app is to share something. Even successful games on the Facebook platform universally require users to share content with friends to progress.
Many of the most basic viral apps are simply based around sending gifts to friends. If 10% of users that receive some sort of virtual gift then go on to send it to an average of 11 friends, your app will be highly viral in no time.
No offense, but putting it on HN in the middle of traffic spike pressures would not help things. ;) I was able to sign up and see just enough to get a feel before the site became unresponsive. I like that it's dead simple. I can also see how it's incredibly viral as it asks you to ask others to describe you -- very smart. At first glance it looks to me like something that could enjoy tons of traffic, but which would…
>> Next, I would try to become known as the place to get a quick summary on anybody -- even celebrities. You mean like About.me is attempting to do? This is an interesting twist though... However - the quick summary I look for on anyone of interest (professionally) is linkedin. I do not and shall not have a facebook account.
A gossipy feel might be better anyway. Imagine the "word status" on Paris Hilton going from "hot" to "classy", "generous" and "caring" or something like that... ;)
Did you actually felt the need to have such a website? Or you just figured people will like it? How did you figure that out?
Please, share.
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You don't even need Facebook connect to try it out, just sign up. Send the site to your friends, they give you three words anonymously, you see them. I need to up the copy on the site.
Then why do you need all those Facebook permissions?
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>> Next, I would try to become known as the place to get a quick summary on anybody -- even celebrities. You mean like About.me is attempting to do? This is an interesting twist though... However - the quick summary I look for on anyone of interest (professionally) is linkedin. I do not and shall not have a facebook account.
Yes, but I'd view this one as more more social/playful, not really serious. :) A gossipy feel might be better anyway. Imagine the "word status" on Paris Hilton going from "hot" to "classy", "generous" and "caring" or something like that... ;)
Where is your current bottleneck? mysql? check your slow query log, turn on the log-queries-not-using-indexes, do a quick analysis of those to see if you have queries that aren't using an index or queries that can be optimized. Probably 90% of the scaling problems are database issues. The quick solution is to scale up your current linode package, however, I think you might find that your traffic is going to peak and…
minimize the server work; get some cheap nodes at rackspace cloud; use one node for sessions in memcache; use two nodes for mongodb (master/slave) read from both; try to minimize xss/html/js and gzip everything; cache as much as possible; maybe even queue inserts/updates with redis and a cron; thats how i survived a mini fb app thatwent from zero to 44 million users in 7 days... rackspace cloud + memcache + redis ins…
the site got twenty two hundred hits within two hours?
Two hundred twenty thousand. In two hours.