What you would call rocket science? This is pretty impressive.
Erlang does a lot of the heavy lifting but even if it did everything out of the box (and it didn't), gluing it all together is no small feat.
Erlang does a lot of the heavy lifting but even if it did everything out of the box (and it didn't), gluing it all together is no small feat.
AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, GroupWise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, SameTime, XMPP, Yahoo, this is a solved problem.
As for the dark launch thing, it is a fancy trick, but there are ways of doing load testing in an automated system by having test servers simulate the load from real users. This usually can give you much better data without wasting bandwidth, slowing down users' experiences, etc.
They had a problem, they solved it in a very cool fashion using the best tool for the job (Erlang), they thought of a very good way of testing the application, and they were gracious enough to share their experiences with us, other developers...
Seems like a win all around, so I'm not going to complain.