Marc Andreessen: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in | Hacker News Reader

Marc Andreessen: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in

blog.pmarca.com

39 pointsabstractbill13 comments

His fourth point, that any good Facebook apps will be killed by the traffic, is a pretty interesting one. In one sense, Facebook Platform lowers the barrier to entry for developers by making it insanely easy to spread the word about a new application, but it's so successful at doing so that you have to have enough physical infrastructure to handle that load. This seems like a perfect use case for Amazon's EC2 and S3, but as he notes, iLike wasn't able to use them to solve all of their traffic problems. Does anyone know of any particular problems inherent in the way Facebook Platform and Amazon's services are set up that makes it difficult to use them together?

Most people don't build their apps to work with an infrastructure like EC2. Or. Their apps can't easily fit into the EC2 model.

In essence, how is EC2 different?

1- Each EC2 instance is essentially 1/4th of a typical server (w/ 4 cores, 16GB ram, 1GB net, ~500G local disk).

2- once an EC2 instance fails, it's gone forever - there is no way to recover local data, you'll never get the same IP addr, etc.

Given these two constraints, EC2 isn't really a viable platform for running services backed by an typical RDBMS (though, I'm sure it can be pulled off, it would be quite a bit of work).

EC2 is _really_ good for apps that "pull" work from a queue - i.e. operate asynchronously.

There are several companies using EC2 with this asnyc idiom, Powerset being the most notable.

Would immediately storing data and sessions to S3 be problematic?

Is it a better idea to use an external machine as a load balancer and an automatic EC2 instance manager?

Is it reasonable to try to build a traditional functional web application in this asynchronous paradigm?

It won't be long before a viable option to accomodate fast growth is availale. S3 does a great job scaling storage, and Amazon is already planning to make EC2 easier to use for web applications.

_FBML strips out some features of HTML, such as Javascript_

What exactly can it do, then?

I'm just completely baffled by facebook. Can somebody explain the appeal of it to me? Now, myspace I always considered lamentable crap, but the appeal was fairly straightforward...it gave people an easy way to build their own websites (which tended to be wildly, err, creative) and a way to connect them to those of their friends. Myspace had a zany, fun, creative...howsoever crappy...appeal to it.

But facebook pages have this sedative-like uniformity that I just can't wrap my head around. Why are the kids going to this? The whole thing feels dull.

The facebook api--can anybody link to a good example of how this works? I'm not sure what kind of 'applications' you can make with stripped-down javascript-free html, but what do I know?

Well, what I know is this: The whole appeal for developers is mathematical. It's just a goldrush--and like any goldrush the profits GO TO THE FIRST ONES WHO ARRIVE. The demand/supply curve is all on the demand side because there are so few facebook "apps" at the moment. Once saturation hits, the old web with its old freedoms will be the only real player again.

"""Now, myspace I always considered lamentable crap, but the appeal was fairly straightforward"""

Wrong. It had superior, free picture galleries and allowed you to quickly find people in your area (via the "browse") _so you can get laid_. Those were THE killer features.

Roughly the same for facebook.

Is any YC-funded company built specifically for such a platform?

Pmarca skips over the danger of being copied by Facebook, which is even easier for them than it was for MS in the Windows era.

FaceBook guys really know some top-notch PR folks. I have never seen a web site API being launched with so much drama.

A platform? Can I build an application on this platform that runs on it's own domain name and takes over 100% of browser real estate? (I am not being sarcastic, I am asking since I haven't spent much time drilling into it)

yes, all of this fb drooling is making me sick.

"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."

I wonder if anyone hosting providers will step up and offer a Facebook level service to budding application developers.

"...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."

Can anyone explain why I can't register as Ludwig van Beethoven on Facebook? Who decides that John Smith is more "legitimate" than LvanB?

I decided. Since you're not LvanB on here I assumed that your were faking.

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