Luckily it’s 2009 and there have been a bunch of successful websites that have had to deal with large scalability challenges. Many have been kind enough to share their knowledge with the world. Here is a list of the best books, articles, presentations and practices from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and more.
April 2009
Apr 15,2009
How to Fix a Broken Marketplace (eBay)
Image via Wikipedia
Do you still remember when eBay was a great place to buy and sell things? Today most auctions close with 0 bids, a minority are purchased at all. Most items are sold by "power sellers" which is really code word for businesses. Heck, most sellers are probably businesses at this point. As eBay discovers it isn't recession proof and scrambles to become a primarily "buy it now" channel it needs to remember what eBay was.
eBay was the ultimate garage / tag / bizzare sale. For the first time ever people -- consumers had an easy way to sell things to other consumers that didn't involve putting up flyers and putting things out on your front lawn. eBay was the first global C2C marketplace. eBay's purchase of paypal was genius and a beautiful marriage (unlike all of eBay's other purchases... yeah we're talking about you skype). The combination of eBay and paypal was great because now consumers which didn't have the resources or need for a merchant account were able to conveniently charge other consumers credit cards. eBay provided the channel, tools and audience for consumers to become sellers and as a result grew exponentially.
Stop Twitter from becoming the next MySpace
Image via CrunchBase
6 months ago Twitter was the best place in existence to use and develop great relations with key players in industry, brilliant thinkers and friends. It has since become popular, and like the kids trying to be popular in high school, has become a whore. Not that it was ever exclusive by restrictions, but rather by obscurity. Now twitter is being over run with spammers, marketeers ( is there a difference ), robots, celebrities, fake celebrities, ghost writers and a whole flood of me too people.
I feel like when a great indy band gets picked up by a major label and all of a sudden they are the "next big thing". Yeah, you, with the T-shirt you bought at hot topic.. You haven't "earned" the shirt. Just cause you bought the album doesn't make you a fan. Please stop talking to me about how great they are. I liked them back when the venue was small and nobody knew their name.
