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Archive for February 20th, 2008

Web Scalability

By Ken Burbary ⋅ February 20, 2008 ⋅ 2 comments

I read a presentation today that covered the challenges businesses face when scaling their web properties as they become more successful. It was originally written and presented by John Engates, Chief Technology Officer at Rackspace IT Hosting. It’s a good explanation of the various stages of growth that online businesses go through and the associated issues that come along the way. There are some mentions of best practices and good recommendations included as well. These are tried and true methods that Rackspace and John have gleaned from their extensive experience with high traffic customers.

You can download the entire presentation in PDF format by clicking here.

The problems outlined in the presentation are well documented and prevalent across the web hosting industry….TODAY. However, with the emergence of on-demand hosting by leveraging cloud computing, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Amazon Simple DB, are many of these challenges still relevant? At the very least on their way to becoming irrelevant in the near future.

As a site owner, if you decide to host with Amazon, you don’t face the horizontal scaling issues that come with traditional web hosting. Those problems are taken out of the equation for you by Amazon. Need more hosting horsepower? Add another server in minutes. That type of horizontal hardware scaling can, and often does, take many days in the traditional web hosting model. Cloud computing is not currently without flaws, but these will be worked out over time. For now, the benefits far outweigh the risks when compared to the traditional web hosting model when looking at it from a scalability perspective.

Can you trust user-supplied data?

By Ken Burbary ⋅ February 20, 2008 ⋅ One comment

I’ve been recently involved in helping some people within our company on Social Media/Networking projects for clients. The focus has primarly been on Facebook, both implementing social ads and Facebook Platform applications. One of the goals is to target a specific demographic among the Facebook user community. No one questioned whether or not the demographic data supplied by Facebook to determine who and where targeted ads will appear was legitimate.

However, after reading this excellent article on the quality of social networking user-supplied data, I need to think about reconsidering how we should approach the advertising component of these projects. The article, by Mike McCamon, suggests there is a dark side to user-supplied data and outlines the risks in blindly accepting it as fact. Doing so will undermine the success of any marketing effort targeting an audience whose demographics data is false or misleading. Now while this may represent only a minority of the overall target, it calls into question whether or not demongraphic data is the most relevant.

The article goes on further to suggest that the future may lie with “intentional data”, information about what a user plans to do in the future. This is what marketers really want to know, a consumer’s honest intentions. Getting users to provide this info will prove to be more difficult than the standard social media demographics which may, or may not, be accurate.

Question of the day: Which social networking sites do you use? Do you reveal personal demographic data that marketers are interested in, or keep a barebones profile?