I've very recently gone through a major life change: I've moved from ignoring invitations to join Facebook to ignoring invitations to add iLike to my Facebook page (admittedly only two today, but I'm a newbie).
iLike is a music discovery application, which puffs itself as follows: "Check out what your friends are listening to, browse the libraries of people with similar tastes, and get Free MP3 downloads by new artists matched to your own music tastes."
Normally something like this would grow slowly as people discovered the Web site. On Facebook, however, you hear about it whenever a friend adopts it -- it's viral -- so adoption can happen at a terrifying pace. The iLike blog says:
Launching just over two weeks ago, iLike on Facebook signed up a million users in its first week; then a million more in the [next] 5 days, and another million in the next 4 days. We're currently signing up about 300,000 new users per day.
Small problem. Under the Facebook architecture, iLike has to provide the servers to handle the traffic. An earlier post said:
We just emailed everybody we knjow across over a dozen Bay Area startups, corporations, and venture firms in a desperate plea to find spare servers so we can triple our capacity for the continued onslaught. Tomorrow we are picking up over 100 servers from different companies to have them installed just to handle the weekend's traffic. (For those who responded to our late night pleas, thank you!)
The power of the Facebook platform has been very well analysed by a sharp new-this-month blogger called Marc Andreesson, who used to be famous as co-founder of Netscape and "the next Bill Gates". He's also aware of the social networking scene because he's started Ning. He says:
The implication is, in my view, quite clear -- the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways.
Sure, you can start an underground app on Facebook, but if it goes viral, it's still going to blow up your servers, whether you like it or not.
Anyway, read Marc's post: there's much more to than that snippet suggests....
