Facebook is bigger than Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey combined

January 8th, 2009 3 Comments »

facebook

Yes you are reading that right, Facebook is bigger than Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey combined in terms of population. Facebook has a staggering count of 150 million users according to Mark Zuckerberg (Founder, Facebook).

Country population breakdown:

Turkey – 71,892,808
Canada – 33,515,000
Australia – 21,468,700
New Zealand – 4,280,000
———————-
Total 131,246,508*

That, my friend, is really impressive! It makes you wonder how they keep their systems running smoothly, how they scale up rapidly.

Facebook has more than 10,000 servers and leverages mostly open-source software across a distributed architecture, with thousands of MySQL instances. “It’s almost a new challenge every day,”

Jonathan Heiliger (Vice President of Technical Operations, Facebook)
CNET interview

That’s not the only thing, Facebook has more than 10 billion photos! Some additional stats:

  • 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site daily
  • Over one petabyte of photo storage
  • Serving over 15 billion photo images per day
  • Photo traffic peaks at over 300,000 images served per second

Truth is, impressive is an understatement.

 

*Source: Wikipedia

NETTUTS Proves Content is Still King

December 2nd, 2008 No Comments »

I’m an avid subscriber of NETTUTS. A popular tech blog that covers a wide range of topics about web development such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, CMS’s, PHP and Ruby on Rails. I was curious how many of their pages are actually indexed at Google and I tried to learn more.

Let’s take a look how many pages at NETTUTS are indexed. Note that this will vary from one location to another, as well as ISP used and nearest datacenter used by Google (I’m currently testing this in North America and the count is going to be variable and approximate).

Let’s hit “site:nettuts.com” at Google. They have approximately 588 indexed pages. Now let’s see how many backlinks they have. Let’s hit “link:nettuts.com“. They have approximately 1,400 links going back to them.

The numbers above are not really that much. However, what matters here is when you look at their RSS feed subscriber count, they have 14,400.

 

So, what’s the point? Sites like NETTUTS still proves that content is king. It doesn’t matter 100% how many pages of your site are indexed at Google, what’s really important is that you deliver quality content to your visitors.

The rest follows.

 

ABS-CBN Acquired Minority Stakes In Multiply.com. Friendster Losing Steam Over Two Day Outage

November 17th, 2008 5 Comments »

ABS-CBN, in a statement said that it will acquire 2.5 million shares (5 percent stake) at Multiply, a Florida-based social networking site. Multiply is the second largest social networking site in the Philippines after Friendster.com. Multiply.com maybe catching up slowly with Friendster.com in terms of unique visitors (see Compete estimates below).

friendster.com multiply.com_uv

Friendster on the other hand, the most popular social networking site in the Philippines may be losing its steam after more than 2 days of downtime due to a data center power outage in Santa Clara, California. You just can’t seem to wonder how did Friendster allowed itself to be offline? Was it because it had a single point of failure? Having one data center housing more than 85 million users? Could a data mirror in Asia have helped since most of their active users are there?

In any event, Multiply just got a strong partner in the Philippines – media giant ABS-CBN. But will Multiply be able to grow their user-base in the Philippines with the help of ABS-CBN and overtake pinoy-favorite Friendster? The answer to this question might be sooner than later.

What are your thoughts?

 

Sources: Business Mirror, ABS-CBN

 

Tad’s Meme on FriendFeed

September 18th, 2008 4 Comments »

Today is “Tad’s meme” day on Friendfeed.

Tad Donaghe started a simple spark posting a photo and a simple instruction “Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair – just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editing. Post these instructions with the picture.” and guess what happened? It just spread like wildfire! Boy, it was a fun day at Friendfeed!

Here’s the photo that started it all:

tad

And the rest followed…

FFmeme

(Click on the above image for the original size or you can visit the album here)

So, are you in this collage? I hope you are! Because we had a lot fun today at Friendfeed!

It was also a good day to push and leave the FriendFeed Beta!

:)

 

UPDATE: Collage updated

Youtube’s Top Viewed Today RSS Feed Is Totally Broken

September 10th, 2008 No Comments »

yt

How? All the video links have changed to http://youtube.com/v/FPd4yk0x-eg.swf now for you to watch it you’ll have to copy the video code (ex “FPd4yk0x-eg”) and paste it on a URL changing it to http://youtube.com/watch?v=FPd4yk0x-eg for it to work.

Youtube team must have forgotten this particular RSS feed when they updated something.

I also noticed a new button on the video player window. Not sure what it is though. See below. This must be the latest update that broke all things up at the RSS feed.

yt2

Drop An "O" At Google

September 5th, 2008 No Comments »

dropanO

So how do you drop an “o” at Google? Just append “&num=100&start=990” without the quotes at the URL after any search.

Google will surely drop one “o”. I wonder why?

Credits

Three Guys And A Hurricane On HurriCam

August 31st, 2008 2 Comments »

While the powerful Gustav Hurricane Category 3 leaves Cuba, New Orleans residents already started to evacuate. Except for some people and three guys with a webcam.

I don’t know who they are but they are streaming live right now from New Orleans.

 

So, if you want to know what is happening at that part of the world, logon to their stream now and join the stream.

Just be safe guys and the rest of you out there at the path of Gustav.

The Javascript RockStar Dude Is Dead. Long Live The Konami Code!

August 30th, 2008 1 Comment »

jQuery.com pulled the Javascript Rockstar graphic responding quickly to user feedback.

jq

The jQuery team left an Easter egg on the website as a token of appreciation. Just enter the famous Konami code to view it.

Hint, it’s really cool!

jQuery’s Logo And Website Gets A Redesign

August 29th, 2008 3 Comments »

jquery

Personally, I say it looks good. Not great, but good. Some jQuery users however don’t like the redesign. Get the scoop on jQuery’s blog.

ASCII Email SPAM Is Here. We Hate It!

August 27th, 2008 No Comments »

Yes. ASCII email spam is here and we hate it. This is what I got today (below).

ascii_spam

There were no links on the email which means people will never have to click on something. But still, it’s annoying.

Email providers, please do something!