Want to scale a system which can handle over 300 million monthly users, approximately half of which are logging in daily? It’s not an easy task however Facebook has managed to pull off an impressive feat but as many users are noticing: not everything is working as it should. The primary problems exist for the minority, yet rapidly growing population, of hyper-connected individuals who have thousands of contacts. So what’s going wrong?

Facebook Scales Horizontally
Facebook has been the most effective platform so far for attracting a large volume of users on a global scale. In an interview with Fast…

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We thought [Kristofer's] Tech Tip about using figlet with scripts was kind of fun. It’s a throwback to the days of logging onto a BBS and being greeted by a vertically scrolling ASCII art image that had been meticulously hand crafted (although a lot of the coolest stuff was actually ANSI art). No hand crafting here, just feed (or pipe) your text to figlet and it outputs the message in ASCII style letters.
When we went to try install this in Ubuntu, the toilet package was suggested. This one’s worth checking out too. It works in much the same…

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[Kyle] decided to build the above LED clock for his church. Though it may look impressive enough, it is also hiding loads of features. [Kyle] wanted to make the clock as easy to control as possible, so rather than use buttons or dials to control what is being displayed, he used Twitter. The clock is connected to the internet through a Linksys WRT54GL. The router was hacked so not only does it supply the connection to Twitter, it also parses all of the replies the clock’s feed gets. The clock responds to commands to turn it on or off, run a countdown before service,…

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The photo tagging phenomenon has officially jumped the shark on Facebook with the All my Friends! application which lets you instantly tag your friends in pre-made images. It’s not exactly a new concept but for some reason this iteration of the application has been extremely successful having attracted over 5 million users so far and growing daily.

The application could actually be a useful service but the way that ads are currently posted within the application makes us think that this app was simply developed to attract millions of users and generate a quick buck. I’ve written about these multi-user…

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This week was another busy one for Facebook who made a number of large announcements on Thursday. Facebook has been pretty consistent with rolling out relatively significant updates and announcements on a weekly basis over the past month. With Facebook beyond 275 million users, based on our internal numbers, Facebook continues the march toward 300 million. Hopefully Facebook continues pushing out weekly news stories so our job of chronicling the company’s activities can stay exciting!

Facebook for Android Launches
As we expected, Facebook for Android officially launched on Tuesday afternoon around the time of Facebook’s mobile press event. Initial reviews…

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While simple display advertisements may not be the best form of ads, more interactive versions have emerged over the years that attempt to provide a more engaging experience for the consumer. Spongecell is the latest company to try to increase the level of engagement by providing display ads which include the ability to become a fan of the advertiser’s Facebook Page.

The result is that brand advertisers can obtain a residual benefit from running these new forms of advertisements. Over the past month I’ve been discussing the best strategies for building out a company’s Facebook Page and why it’s so…

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iTunes may have just taken a massive blow at iLike today with the launch of a “share on Facebook” feature which will enable users to post iTunes songs to their profile. While there are few details about the new feature, there is the potential that actual song samples will eventually be posted to your Facebook feed. Such a move would be a direct attack on iLike who began offering a similar service since Facebook first opened up the stream. While the new “Share on Facebook” feature is extremely valuable, of more interest was a statement by Apple about the number…

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This is Day 22 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
Forums are one of the best places on the internet to generate awareness about a product and to drive traffic. There are forums for just about anything and relevant forums around the web provide a great opportunity to participate in the conversation and drive awareness to your Facebook Page. In addition to forums around the web, you also have forums on your Facebook Page, which are installed by default. Today we’ll be going over a few external forum strategies as…

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