Disqus - Latest Comments for Giberti

Re: MySpace’s U.S. Traffic Falls Off a Cliff

Giberti — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:55:21 -0000

Ben,

I generally agree - it's a train wreck over there and the recent shedding staff isn't going to save them. However, I don't know that I'd say an increase of 1/2 million is an acceleration at this point. It could be chalked that up to margin of error and you could have been a bit less sensationalist in the title. That aside I wanted to make 2 points.

First, Like their methodology or not - the Alexa graphs for Page View and Reach paint a much bleaker picture. The graphs shows a steady linear decline starting Summer 2008. The graph is worth taking a look at: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myspace.com (open it up to max)

Second, I believe that had MySpace been more open with support of third party applications early on, moving from less restrictive to more restrictive as Facebook did, they would have gotten similar initial adoption and garnered buzz as Facebook has (and continues to do). They could have single handedly make OpenSocial a giant success in the US.

Erik

Re: Getting Good IO from Moody EBS

Giberti — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:46:34 -0000

This is great information! I was wondering recently if after 6-8 drives, there wouldn't start to be a degradation in the performance gains because of the processor cycles required to keep the software raid running. I just handn't gotten around to scripting a test. Based on your findings, that doesn't appear to be the case.

I also blogged about some speed improvements I noticed with different filesystems and configs as well. http://af-design.com/blog/2009/02/27/amazon-ec2... According to a commenter there, Amazon states that under certain circumstances, EBS stores will fail at an "annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%." So be careful about assuming the drives are more robust than "real" drives.

Re: Woman Sued for $50,000 Over a Tweet

Giberti — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:46:44 -0000

About ~$560 per letter. Good thing she didn't use the full 140 or they would have sued for > $75,000!

Re: Private Clouds and the RDBMS

Giberti — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:38:14 -0000

Great points, although I would say many shops have far more resources allocated to their DB environment than are really necessary. Also, with oversubscription as you mentioned briefly, some clients may be able to position virtual machine instances that have different peak times to further reduce idle computing resources. I've read (although never worked with it) that Mosso from Rackspace provides mixed availability of physical and virtual equipment. @giberti

Re: Maybach 72: A stretched Maybach 62 for those that need more seats

Giberti — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:32:52 -0000

it's like a minivan that doesn't suck

Re: Facebook Approves $150 Million Application Bailout

Giberti — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:26:50 -0000

Nice job dropping keywords! I hope you'll report back on the spike in traffic. Thanks for the laugh.

Re: SGN Expands Beyond Facebook, Launches iPhone Game

Giberti — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:39:37 -0000

Nick, you might need to check out some other games or get out more if this was entertaining for you. I actually download this this morning and found the game to be quite lame. I also wonder how long before someone chucks their iPhone/iPod touch and destroys it playing the game?

Re: Facebook Duplicates Microsoft Windows With New Design, Becomes the Web OS

Giberti — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 10:18:47 -0000

Too bad they didn't go with Apple's UI on this one. Perhaps MySpace will go this route to differentiate themselves from the last Facebook style navigation they had ripped off.

Erik <-Apple Fanboy

Re: Facebook Takes Another Jab at Developers

Giberti — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:07:22 -0000

As you've said, only time will tell on this one. But I don't think it will hurt anymore than the format providing links to the most recently used did. If an app wasn't used recently, it was buried in the last iteration anyway. Now when you go to the "Authorized" apps - you get them all.

Oh, and you might consider checking the 615 messages you've got pending Nick ;)

Re: Users Fight Back Against the New Facebook

Giberti — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:16:19 -0000

I personally find I'm using the commenting features far more than I had before. I'm enjoying the friend feed style replies to news items. I'm also finding I'm generating more stuff thanks to the publisher.

BUT: The new design does have some drawbacks for casual/non-frequent users. If every time someone visits a site there have been changes, it forces them to relearn the interface etc. For those users, these massive changes are more disruptive than for those of us who are on Facebook all day (or at least a good portion of it).

For example, if I had spent any time customizing my left hand navigation so the apps and tools I found most valuable were right there at my mouse tip, when I come back and see the new design, they're gone. Yes, I know they're all still in the applications submenu (or most of them are anyway), it's frustrating for that casual user who hadn't realized there was a new design/layout coming. As hard as it may be to believe - not everyone follows Facebook news as closely as we all do.

Re: Social Times Receives $15 Million Valuation

Giberti — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:42:25 -0000

Hey Nick, let me in on the friends and family portion of the IPO!

Re: f8 Post-Keynote Press Event

Giberti — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:38:37 -0000

Might be time to invest in a better mic for the camcorder. The background noise was frustrating when trying to hear the questions.

Re: Post Event Press Interview

Giberti — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:39:52 -0000

Nick, did anyone record the press event? Would love to watch/listen to it. Almost seems more informative than Zuck's keynote address.

Re: Facebook Changes Default Icon for Users

Giberti — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:27:09 -0000

Icon has ears now - changed it again today...

Re: The iPhone Isn’t Really Wireless

Giberti — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:38:13 -0000

After the new toy effect wears off, I'd be curious to know how you actually use it - say in 2 months.

Re: MySpace Platform Catching Up to Facebook

Giberti — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:35:49 -0000

MySpace's developer platform certainly is growing - leaps and bounds - and "there's gold in them hills" for those willing to find it. OpenSocial will eventually overtake Facebook's platform. Unfortunately there aren't a lot of options for apps looking to make money with advertising on MySpace at this point. Most of the ad networks that have grown up to serve the Facebook audience haven't gotten their act together of MySpace and the value just isn't there.

Re: Breaking: Top Friends Returns

Giberti — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:59:41 -0000

Amazing that after being down for a week they still managed to keep a daily active number of 1M.

Re: Run and Jump Onto the Latest Microblogging Serivce: Identi.ca

Giberti — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:58:52 -0000

I suspect twitter will have it's act together in the next 1-2 months. The gang over there has been very open and transparent and it seems they're getting it together. Additionally, the who's who of social media are there and for this vertical - there's no other place currently that matters. Identi.ca isn't ready for prime time and friendfeed is missing some key functionality that twitter already has like blocking.

Re: Social Advertising Faces Big Privacy Debate

Giberti — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:41:32 -0000

The Zynga Game network has been doing this for a while. Take a look at any of the games and you'll see not only ads for other networked games, but also which ones your friends are playing and which ones they have played recently.

As far as I know, there's no opt-out feature for the users either.

Re: Microblogging should be decentralized (Scripting News)

Giberti — Sat, 03 May 2008 21:51:55 -0000

What about a torrent style system for hosting of the feed? That would let you replicate the feed more broadly so high traffic feeds could be digested more easily and it doesn't rely on the user to set up machine instances etc

Re: Facebook Walks Fine Line With App Developers

Giberti — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:12:08 -0000

This is exactly what Mitch Kapor warned could happen to developers of a platform in his address to the CommunityNext conference back in October. The AllFacebook Video is here for those who missed it: http://www.viddler.com/explore/allfacebook/vide...

Re: Yahoo Potentially Joining OpenSocial

Giberti — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:02:27 -0000

TechCruch is saying this is a done deal.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/12/yahoo-to-j...

Re: OpenSocial Gets Delayed

Giberti — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:29:16 -0000

Unless MySpace gets their act together, there is no way they'll have their platform ready for next week. The list of almost working functions seems to grow daily.

Re: The UADA: A United Front for App Developers?

Giberti — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:47:51 -0000

This makes sense given Lee's post earlier today titled "Facebook is to Developers What eBay is to Power Sellers": http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=845639...

Re: Forced Invites Get Shutdown

Giberti — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:26:58 -0000

Thank God! Now I'll be able to find out what kind of drunk I am without inviting everyone I know. But seriously, this will make the whole Facebook platform experience better for everyone.

I've gotten feedback from some friends who joined FB in November that they're not visiting or using the site regularly due to the overwhelming number of invites to bite, kick, scratch, punch or whatever application the few really offensive developers have been developing. The really small shops who are doing this don't get as far.

The signal to noise ratio has reached a tipping point - and Facebook is finally doing something about it.