Friends for Sale Architecture - A 300 Million Page View/Month Facebook RoR App | Hacker News Reader

Friends for Sale Architecture - A 300 Million Page View/Month Facebook RoR App

highscalability.com

35 pointschaostheory18 comments

Great to see this float to the front page. blader announced their launch right here on news.yc: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74993

That said, is this YC-funded?

It's a toy application on a real infrastructure. Wait until developers start writing some real value-adding/lifestyle Facebook apps. Real Facebook applications will intermediate between users without requiring their direct input (think Personal Assistants). That being said, 300M page views/month is something most indie developers would sell their friends for - though it might be a bit embarassing that it's such a LCD app.

I wouldn't expect to see value-adding apps too soon... unless FB is willing to make some significant changes to their platform. There's simply no incentive to make them right now -- virality continues to be the main criterion for app success.

The #1 value added app for lots of people, whether they know it or not, is exportability insurance. Make an app that tracks everything externally so that if Facebook starts to suck, you can migrate the next platform.

The existence of that portability might actually ensure things never start sucking.

I believe it's been tried. They got shut down.

the end is nigh

I think five years from now we won't be logging into Facebook but we'll be talking to our mobile devices and they'll be scheduling reservations for us (it will all be autonomous agents doing tasks/chores for us on behalf of our openID)

If and when that time comes I'll consider using Facebook.

Until then, I don't care that, e.g., Joey H. who I took 9th grade English with is totally stressed out about finals or whatever.

It this a type of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping

What do you guys think is a "reasonable CPM"? $0.001? $0.01? $0.05?

I think those are too low. At $0.05 CPM, 300 million page views would earn just $15000 a month. I doubt that that many pages could be served for a few thousand dollars. Look at their hardware and bandwidth costs and work out what a profitable CPM would be from there.

3E8 * .05 = 15 million, not 15000

CPM = cost per mille

300 000 000 / 1000 * 0.5 = 15000

So it's a french thing?

M stands for mille, which is latin for thousand (think Roman numerals). Thats also where you get the prefix, as in milliliter.

Should that be 150000?

typo 0.05

absolute minimum would be $.5

Reply on news.ycombinator.com