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Its funny I don't know (can't think of one) of a high traffic site that "died" due to technical failures (particularly scaling failures). Twitter had massive

Its funny I don't know (can't think of one) of a high traffic site that "died" due to technical failures (particularly scaling failures). Twitter had massive problems during its growth phase, Reddit has had similar problems. Does anyone have an example of a site that got "killed" by technical issues? I'm really curious. Bad products tend to die or get replaced by superior offerings. Thats the nature of business. Not being able to innovate rapidly because of technical lock in is the only way these types of issues can "kill" a site. But its very hard to quantify these types of issues. Between this article and Kevin Rose's statements about hiring B&C level programming talent it seems like a lot of engineers are getting tossed under buses, for poor management decisions.

hboon 16y ago
LiveJournal maybe.
ntoshev 16y ago
Friendster. Maybe there are lot's of others who just had technically competent competitors, so we never knew about them in the first place.
chaz 16y ago
Friendster: http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-lead-because-of-a-failure-to-scale.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-l... VB: Can you tell me a bit about what you learned in your time at Friendster? JS: For me, it basically came down to failed execution on the technology side — we had millions of Friendster members begging us to get the site working faster so they could log in and spend hours social networking with their friends. I remember coming in to the office for months reading thousands of customer service emails telling us that if we didn’t get our site working better soon, they’d be ‘forced to join’ a new social networking site that had just launched called MySpace…the rest is history. To be fair to Friendster’s technology team at the time, they were on the forefront of many new scaling and database issues that web sites simply hadn’t had to deal with prior to Friendster. As is often the case, the early pioneer made critical mistakes that enabled later entrants to the market, MySpace, Facebook & Bebo to learn and excel. As a postscript to the story, it’s interesting to note that Kent Lindstrom (CEO of Friendster) and the rest of the team have done an outstanding job righting that ship.
- lallysingh 16y ago
  To be fair to the rest of the industry, a single glance at the front page shows size of the TRANSITIVE CLOSURE of your social network. Why would you do that? This is bread & butter algorithm analysis. Don't put O(n^2) analyses on your most-loaded page.
  - shalinmangar 16y ago
    You are assuming that it is computed on page load.
  - spitfire 16y ago
    I actually respect that. While facebook brags about their "social graph" (IE: A list of friends they don't do anything with), friendster tried to take on the hard CS problems. Sure they failed, but they were never fake about it. And they were one of the first.
  - aamar 16y ago
    I have heard from insiders that the founder viewed this feature--the count of people 3 degrees away--as the central embodiment of the magic of Friendster, an absolute must-have. I.e. people added friends in great part in order to feel more connected to 100ks of people. Others in the company begged to at least back it down to a count of people 2 degrees away; but the founder insisted that the magic was the 3-degree version. So instead the company pursued technical strategies to speed up the 3-degree count; don't know what those were precisely, but it seems that they were not pursued as zealously as they could be (due to VoIP, etc. distractions). My understanding, by the way, is that the network size was computed on page-load until surprisingly very late, due to the perceived need for real-time. Even after it was cached, it was still computationally expensive, as your numbers were computed (roughly) every time your 3-degree network added a link. In retrospect, A/B testing could have been used to test the executive vision. So although my first reaction upon hearing this story (years ago) was: "that's big-O insanity," now I think that it's just as much a story about willingness to subject vision to empirical data and performing clinical cost/benefit analysis (when appropriate).
  - kragen 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mnutt 16y ago
I've often heard people cite Friendster's outages and slow loading time as one of the reasons for its decline. But yes, it's usually a secondary issue and not a primary cause.
dingle_thunk 16y ago
Digg got slow and started to loose people to reddit. This caused them to rebuild from scratch with a new strategy which ultimately failed. Yahoo was also slow. Funnily enough, now I think about it, performance may be much more critical than periods of downtime.
gamble 16y ago
LiveJournal is a good example. They were forced to go invitation-only for a long time because they couldn't handle the traffic. By the time they had the technical issues under control attention had shifted elsewhere.

hboon 16y ago

LiveJournal maybe.

ntoshev 16y ago

Friendster. Maybe there are lot's of others who just had technically competent competitors, so we never knew about them in the first place.

chaz 16y ago

Friendster: http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-lead-because-of-a-failure-to-scale.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-l... VB: Can you tell me a bit about what you learned in your time at Friendster? JS: For me, it basically came down to failed execution on the technology side — we had millions of Friendster members begging us to get the site working faster so they could log in and spend hours social networking with their friends. I remember coming in to the office for months reading thousands of customer service emails telling us that if we didn’t get our site working better soon, they’d be ‘forced to join’ a new social networking site that had just launched called MySpace…the rest is history. To be fair to Friendster’s technology team at the time, they were on the forefront of many new scaling and database issues that web sites simply hadn’t had to deal with prior to Friendster. As is often the case, the early pioneer made critical mistakes that enabled later entrants to the market, MySpace, Facebook & Bebo to learn and excel. As a postscript to the story, it’s interesting to note that Kent Lindstrom (CEO of Friendster) and the rest of the team have done an outstanding job righting that ship.

lallysingh 16y ago
To be fair to the rest of the industry, a single glance at the front page shows size of the TRANSITIVE CLOSURE of your social network. Why would you do that? This is bread & butter algorithm analysis. Don't put O(n^2) analyses on your most-loaded page.
- shalinmangar 16y ago
  You are assuming that it is computed on page load.
- spitfire 16y ago
  I actually respect that. While facebook brags about their "social graph" (IE: A list of friends they don't do anything with), friendster tried to take on the hard CS problems. Sure they failed, but they were never fake about it. And they were one of the first.
- aamar 16y ago
  I have heard from insiders that the founder viewed this feature--the count of people 3 degrees away--as the central embodiment of the magic of Friendster, an absolute must-have. I.e. people added friends in great part in order to feel more connected to 100ks of people. Others in the company begged to at least back it down to a count of people 2 degrees away; but the founder insisted that the magic was the 3-degree version. So instead the company pursued technical strategies to speed up the 3-degree count; don't know what those were precisely, but it seems that they were not pursued as zealously as they could be (due to VoIP, etc. distractions). My understanding, by the way, is that the network size was computed on page-load until surprisingly very late, due to the perceived need for real-time. Even after it was cached, it was still computationally expensive, as your numbers were computed (roughly) every time your 3-degree network added a link. In retrospect, A/B testing could have been used to test the executive vision. So although my first reaction upon hearing this story (years ago) was: "that's big-O insanity," now I think that it's just as much a story about willingness to subject vision to empirical data and performing clinical cost/benefit analysis (when appropriate).
- kragen 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

mnutt 16y ago

I've often heard people cite Friendster's outages and slow loading time as one of the reasons for its decline. But yes, it's usually a secondary issue and not a primary cause.

dingle_thunk 16y ago

Digg got slow and started to loose people to reddit. This caused them to rebuild from scratch with a new strategy which ultimately failed. Yahoo was also slow. Funnily enough, now I think about it, performance may be much more critical than periods of downtime.

gamble 16y ago

LiveJournal is a good example. They were forced to go invitation-only for a long time because they couldn't handle the traffic. By the time they had the technical issues under control attention had shifted elsewhere.