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This is a delightful retelling; thanks for sharing. > I know of absolutely no service which failed because it couldn't scale. Genuine question: what about Fri

This is a delightful retelling; thanks for sharing. > I know of absolutely no service which failed because it couldn't scale. Genuine question: what about Friendster?

timewarrior 10y ago
I remember reading that Friendster founder was complaining that there were facing a lot of technical issues and investors were not letting him invest effort in fixing them. IMHO, if your investors need to be involved in seeking approval for handling scaling pains and on top of that if they reject it - there are deeper issues within the company (management issues, politics, technical incompetence, leadership issues). So to clarify my point - any team could still screw up technical execution. However there is no reason that given a good team and support from within the company, a product can't be scaled.
pbreit 10y ago
Friendster's problem was that instead of fixing its problems, it decided to re-write.
jssmith 10y ago
Friendster definitely failed because they couldn't pull off scale. I was CTO of the Tagged social network at the time and the issue loomed large during our 2005 fundraising. Investors had seen $50m go down the drain when Friendster got slow. Despite network effects, users moved over to products that were up and running (mostly MySpace but also hi5, etc.). I seem to recall that the Friendster team had more than one aborted rewrite before they got it right, and by then it was too late. Scaling social networks required a different bag of tricks than was popular at the time (e.g., database replication was well accepted as a best practice, but sharding worked much better). Talented people could still get it wrong. Still, social networking illustrates how failing to scale is rare, and should practically never be the concern early on. Almost every social network that gained traction struggled to scale at times, but the vast majority of them overcame their challenges. We poured sweat and tears and many sleepless nights into scaling the Tagged back-end from 10 machines to over 1,000, over time serving hundreds of millions of users. It was a tremendous amount of work, much more than building the initial product, and I don't think there's much we could have done early on to make later scaling easier. More on the story: http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/8/8/tagged-architecture-scaling-to-100-million-users-1000-server.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/8/8/tagged-architecture...
- timewarrior 10y ago
  Thanks for sharing your experience. There is always scope for a botched execution or just pure bad luck. I wish someone shared more candid details of what happened at Friendster.
  - MusaTheRedGuard 10y ago
    The Startup podcast[1] has an upcoming series about Friendster 1 - https://gimletmedia.com/startup/ https://gimletmedia.com/startup/

This is a delightful retelling; thanks for sharing. > I know of absolutely no service which failed because it couldn't scale. Genuine question: what about Friendster?

timewarrior 10y ago

I remember reading that Friendster founder was complaining that there were facing a lot of technical issues and investors were not letting him invest effort in fixing them. IMHO, if your investors need to be involved in seeking approval for handling scaling pains and on top of that if they reject it - there are deeper issues within the company (management issues, politics, technical incompetence, leadership issues). So to clarify my point - any team could still screw up technical execution. However there is no reason that given a good team and support from within the company, a product can't be scaled.

pbreit 10y ago

Friendster's problem was that instead of fixing its problems, it decided to re-write.

jssmith 10y ago

Friendster definitely failed because they couldn't pull off scale. I was CTO of the Tagged social network at the time and the issue loomed large during our 2005 fundraising. Investors had seen $50m go down the drain when Friendster got slow. Despite network effects, users moved over to products that were up and running (mostly MySpace but also hi5, etc.). I seem to recall that the Friendster team had more than one aborted rewrite before they got it right, and by then it was too late. Scaling social networks required a different bag of tricks than was popular at the time (e.g., database replication was well accepted as a best practice, but sharding worked much better). Talented people could still get it wrong. Still, social networking illustrates how failing to scale is rare, and should practically never be the concern early on. Almost every social network that gained traction struggled to scale at times, but the vast majority of them overcame their challenges. We poured sweat and tears and many sleepless nights into scaling the Tagged back-end from 10 machines to over 1,000, over time serving hundreds of millions of users. It was a tremendous amount of work, much more than building the initial product, and I don't think there's much we could have done early on to make later scaling easier. More on the story: http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/8/8/tagged-architecture-scaling-to-100-million-users-1000-server.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/8/8/tagged-architecture...

timewarrior 10y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience. There is always scope for a botched execution or just pure bad luck. I wish someone shared more candid details of what happened at Friendster.
- MusaTheRedGuard 10y ago
  The Startup podcast[1] has an upcoming series about Friendster 1 - https://gimletmedia.com/startup/ https://gimletmedia.com/startup/