Building the MySpace backend

The problem was, it was a better GeoCities. Vanity blogs for people with internet friends.

Facebook used real names, so it helped people connect with their real friends; even the ones they weren't confortable being "internet friends" with.

I'm not saying this was genius. It was probably just luck. Or the result of Facebook being optimized for a single college, which was a microcosm of the real world - getting everyone to sign-up was only possible using real names.

Of course, it helped that Facebook has stayed small, and stayed pretty close to its pragmatic hacker roots.

The scale was a new challenge to most people back then, we did the best we could - which most of the time was more than good enough - learnt a lot of good lessons and had a great team. In the end, we lost because we focused on advertisers and increasing the companies headcount for the sake of it.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX10/EX04

In general they were solved similarly - build custom middleware and go as distributed as possible.

Now I realize that's a simplistic answer to a very complicated problem but really guys, this isn't unprecedented and the hardware is a lot more capable and cheaper than the 1997 equivalents.

Was NoSQL around back then? They're right about the custom hacking that is required and that Facebook does (i.e. MySQL).

Good web technologies existed at the time. They may have not had Rails or Django but servlets were certainly an option.

MySpace and Digg, now its Facebook and Reddit, what will it be next? HN still seems to be too intelligent for the main-mainstream to invade luckily.