250K New Users Add Facebook Every Day
Published by Rodney Rumford July 1st, 2008 in Facebook.Facebook has experienced phenomenal growth in the past year. They are currently at over 80 Million users. On average they are adding over 250,000 new user every day! This brings some major technological challenges as well as scaling issues.
Facebook has operated through this phenomenal growth curve with virtually no loss or interruption of service. Not like our dear friends at twitter who continue to struggle with delivering their service on a daily basis. Delivering a reliable technology offering is much harder than meets the eye.
My friend Dan Farber at CNET news did an interview with Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations about how facebook is managing this growth and keeping the service humming along. Very interesting read for those that are interested.
The thing about facebook is that you just assume that it is going to work; just like you check Google to make sure you are connected and online. Facebook really has performed at that rock solid level. This means they have the right team in place and are executing quite well.
The growth for facebook continues to move onward. This means that facebook is continuing to gain an audience that marketers will want to reach in an engaging way in the coming years (if not right now).
Technorati Tags: facebook, technology
3 Responses to “250K New Users Add Facebook Every Day”
- 1 Pingback on Jul 15th, 2008 at 9:57 am
“But Don’t Use PHP!”
It doesn’t matter what language you build a site in, as long as you hire the right people to build a scalable product, you should be fine in PHP or RoR.
Rodney,
While it’s true Facebook doesn’t go down as they scale, they’ve also put a much larger investment into their hardware. Then there was the big purchase of servers just a few months ago to add to their estimated 10K servers… well, if Twitter had that kind of hardware - I’m sure they’d be up 99% of the time too! If Mike Arrington is right about 3 primary MySQL servers running the whole show at Twitter, it should come as no surprise that they’ve got performance issues. Text messaging isn’t “free” for providers and I’m sure they spend a pretty penny on keeping up with the SMS charges.
Ultimately, I think it’s an unfair comparison. Twitter’s received $20M to date where as Facebook has received $496 and has a revenue stream with ads to boot!
Erik