

Stop the presses: Facebook CTO says news next in social revolution - wippler
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12406171

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tgriesser
Gotta love sensationalist headlines...

Should read: Facebook CTO says purchasing servers for a separate startup prior
to Facebook _might_ have been unnecessary

The idea that Facebook wouldn't need its own data centers is pretty
ridiculous, and that's what the title implies

EDIT: looks like "while at FriendFeed" was added for clarity ... Further edit:
The title is changed now, but the original said "Facebook CTO says purchasing
servers was his biggest mistake" or something of the like

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butu5
yeah true.. title is completely mis leading. When I read this thought facebook
did mistake on purchasing it's own server and setting up it's datacenter.

But Bret (CTO of facebook, co-founder of Friendfeed) talks about Friendfeed
here. Considering friendfeed growing and struggling stage to make it's
presence. There is lot of other thing to worry than maintaining own data
center.

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cagenut
friendfeed was built in 08, before amazon had released EBS as a feature. there
is no way in hell the instance-store disk i/o would have kept up with
friendfeeds mysql demands (you may remember the post Bret himself wrote on
their nifty approach to mysql: <http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-
uses-mysql> ) Frankly, even EBS probably wouldn't have. Plus, back in 08 the
larger ec2 instances were still pretty low on ram compared to what you could
cheaply cram in a colo'd server, putting even more pressure on the disk i/o.

I think Bret's really wishing what almost everyone is, that these problems
would just go away and you could pay a reasonable premium for that, but we're
not there yet and certainly weren't in 2008. I don't think he really checked
his numbers on this one.

edit: however there is a happy medium. managed service providers will gladly
charge you ec2 prices (250/month for a low end server, 500/month for a beefy
one) while handling all midnight colo trips for you.

~~~
samvj
Don't worry, people are on it - <http://www.dotcloud.com> :)

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johngalt
When someone says "My biggest mistake is doing X and not Y. X turned out to be
really hard." I wonder if they know how difficult Y would be as well.

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petercooper
In other news, Amazon's CTO says his worst decision was to buy servers as they
could have just rolled EC2's API out on Dreamhost's Private Servers offering..

Less facetiously, this "regret" surprises me. I'd have though that of anyone,
Facebook would want to have full control and security over their own servers.
Agreeing to a contract where Amazon can pull the plug over "objectionable"
content or even adverse effects on their network poses a significant risk for
any large business to accept.

~~~
chime
He is not talking about servers for Facebook but his old startup, Friendfeed.

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spitfire
Until some very smart people get together and restart tandem, buying hardware
will be a poor decision. Designing for a fail-by-design architecture will be
the right thing to do. and if you have fail by design, why not just ship the
executable to whoever's the cheapest virtual hosting at the moment.

PS: To very smart people: Please get together and start Tandem: the sequel.
Pretty, pretty please. With sugar on top.

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CodeMage
The _only_ two paragraphs that actually match the headline:

 _If we had to guess, it's probably going to be orientated around media or
news, because they are so social. When you watch a television show with your
friend, it's such an engaging social activity.

We think that there's a next generation of startups that are developing social
versions of these applications, where what Zynga is to gaming, they will be to
media and news, and we're really excited about that._

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erik_p
In addition to the misleading title, you gotta love the "Yell" typo for "Yelp"
in the article...

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rodh
Yell is the company that publishes the UK Yellow Pages. I'm sure Bret Taylor
meant Yelp. However: <http://www.yell.com/reviews/> "The places to go, by the
locals in the know". Or so they say.

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marcamillion
It's funny the differences in headlines between one tailored for HN and BBC
audiences respectively.

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bhoung
something about the t-shirt under the shirt look that detracts from the
article.

