Facebook’s Srinivas Narayan writes a fascinating note about the preparation that occurred in Palo Alto prior to Facebook opening up its platform to vanity URL’s:
Since it was difficult to get accurate estimates on the number of users that would login at launch time to get a username, we tested our systems under fairly high load – in fact, we stress tested our system with more than 10x the load we actually saw at launch time. The load testing helped us identify several problems in our infrastructure including but not limited to (1) improperly configured networks (2) bottlenecks in our database id generation mechanism (to generated primary keys for certain objects) (3) capacity bottlenecks for write traffic originating from our east coast data center.
The site may be frustratingly slow at times, but this kind of advanced preparation is what makes Facebook stand apart from sites like Twitter and MySpace, whose users continue to suffer from the sites’ inability to adequately scale.
Claiming your corporate brand is an important part of your social marketing mix. In addition, grabbing your personal URL is important for controlling your personal brand. I was one of the first people to register a vanity URL: less than 5 seconds after the opening bell, I had registered www.facebook.com/sagar . I even got a friend request a few weeks later from another Facebook user named Sagar who said he simply wanted to know the person who had beat him to the punch.
Ain’t social networking grand? Of course, I accepted his friend request.
via Facebook | Designing the Facebook username land rush.
