I think at the time before facebook/twitter/etc., solving the scaling problem was much harder. I recall reading something years and years ago about how they wa

I think at the time before facebook/twitter/etc., solving the scaling problem was much harder. I recall reading something years and years ago about how they wanted to have celebrity accounts that you could add as a friend, but solving the problem of "britney spears logs on and notifies 1M accounts" was too expensive. For example, see here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mayurk/archive/2005/03/22/400685.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mayurk/archive/2005/03/22/400685.asp... In 2005, the contact limit was doubled to 300. There are probably hard technical reasons why they couldn't have social networks like twitter and facebook do today.