Nataasha's Web 2.0 Blog

Pattern Eight: Lightweight Models & Cost-Effective Scalability

nataashatorzsa — Mon, 10 May 2010 03:26:26 +0000

Adopting a scalable, cost-effective strategy in your business model and technology can help to deliver products to market faster and cheaper without sacrificing future growth. This is part of a successful Web 2.0 business. Many online companies/businesses started out very small and have grown to something much bigger. This growth can be in terms of technology or staffing. Wikipedia for example started out with only 22 staff members even though it is the 7th largest site on the internet. There are many benefits to this such as:

•Faster time to market

•Faster Return on Investment through reduced cost and time

•Reduced risk of project and product failure

•Greater adaptability & scalability

In terms of growth in technology take Digg for example. Digg started with $2,000, a single hosted server ($99 per-month), free open source software, and an outsourced $10 per-hour developer from Elance. Digg has currently grown to serve more than 100 million page views a day and more than 90 servers, but still only has 15 staff.

Myspace Logo

The example I want to talk about this week is Myspace. Myspace is a social networking site that has grown immensely since it was first started. Myspace’s growth has been more on the technology side then the staffing side. It has also grown widely with members since its beginning.

The key to Myspaces’ success is in its Business Model. A feature that attracts many musicians is the introduction of the ‘MySpace Music’ section, which allows anyone to create a MySpace music profile and upload their own work to the Internet in hopes of being discovered. However, the immense success of this feature was heard throughout the world which lead to many up-and-coming solo musicians going major, all of which are success stories of their own levels with endless futures of super-stardom. If an artist has been ranked high in the daily MySpace top-artists section for his work they will have many hits and more chance of becoming a major artist. Another main feature of Myspace is its high amount of advertising. This gives the company a lot of advertising revenue.

Advertising on Myspace

Now lets take a look at Myspaces’ growth in terms of technology. MySpace started small, with two Web servers talking to a single database server. Originally, they were 2-processor Dell servers loaded with 4 gigabytes of memory. But at 500,000 accounts, which MySpace reached in early 2004, the workload became too much for a single database. MySpace then ran on three SQL Server databases. As MySpace registration passed 1 million accounts and was closing in on 2 million, the service began knocking up against the input/output (I/O) capacity of the database servers—the speed at which they were capable of reading and writing data. At 2 million accounts, MySpace also switched from using storage devices directly attached to its database servers to a storage area network(SAN). The change to a SAN boosted performance, uptime and reliability.

By mid-2004, MySpace had arrived at the point where it had to make what Web developers call the “scale up” versus “scale out” decision—whether to scale up to bigger, more powerful and more expensive servers, or spread out the database workload across lots of relatively cheap servers. Fast forward a few years and Myspace grew to 3 data centers, 2682 web servers, 90 cache servers, 60 database servers, 150 media processing servers, 1000 SAN storage disks, and consumes 17,000 MB per second of bandwidth. Now that is a massive difference to when they first began.

For a bigger look at the 10 best things you can learn about scalability from sites like Myspace visit this site: http://www.caffeinatedcoder.com/10-lessons-in-scalability-from-myspace/

References:

Ball, R. (2008) 10 Lessons in Scalability from Myspace. Retrieved May 12, 2010 from http://www.caffeinatedcoder.com/10-lessons-in-scalability-from-myspace/
Carr, D. (2007) Inside Myspace: The Story. Retrieved May 11, 2010 from http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Networks-and-Storage/Inside-MySpacecom
Digg. (2010) Digg Homepage. Retrieved May 10, 2010 from http://digg.com
Elance(2010) Elance. Retrieved May 10, 2010 from http://www.elance.com/
Myspace. (2010) Myspace Homepage. Retrieved May 10, 2010 from http://www.myspace.com
O’Reilly Media. (2005). What is Web 2.0?. Retrieved May 10, 2010 from http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html
Wikipedia. (2010) Myspace. Retrieved May 10, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace
Wilkins, W. (n.d) A look at Myspaces’ Business Model. Retrieved May 11, 2010 from http://www.helium.com/items/706365-a-look-at-myspaces-business-model

Pattern Seven: Leveraging the Long Tail

nataashatorzsa — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:08:05 +0000

A Graphical Example of 'The Long Tail'

In 2004 Wired Magazine writer Chris Anderson defined the economic model/concept of the ‘Long Tail‘. He later went on to write a book about it. “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More” was published in 2006. At the end of this post is a video giving an introduction to it. The basis of his strategy is that:

“Small sites make up the bulk of the Internets’ content: narrow niches make up the bulk of the Internets’ possible applications.”

Using the full reach of the internet you can make money out of very small nice markets that without the internet their profitability would be too small. The internet is like a bookshelf without limits. There is very low cost of production & distribution. Teamed with infinite shelf space online stores can now provide to niche markets.

The long tail model above can be explained in two sections. The section on left represents the most popular products – the hits and mass market items at the head of the demand curve. These limited number of items sell in large volumes. The steep slope leads into a much broader part of the market, the ‘Long Tail’. Each of these items sell far fewer units than the current hits and popular products, but the total number of niches in the tail represents significant market opportunities. Learning about how to leverage the long tail in your marketing has many benefits. This practical guide to leveraging the long tail could help you turn your online store/service into one as successful as my next example.

The two sites that people think of when talking about Leveraging the Long Tail are Amazon.com and Netflix.com. These two sites both sell a large number of products, more then the average book store or dvd store.

Netflix

For example, Netflix rents over 60,000 unique DVD titles every day. This is over 60% of its entire inventory of 100,000 selections. The average Blockbuster store stocks less than 3,000 DVDs. This means that Netflix can cater to a wider range of tastes and niches in the DVD world. For those of you love documentaries Amazon.com has around 17,000 documentaries in stock, Netflix has around 1,100 and your local Blockbuster has around 75. A fifth of Netflix rentals are outside its top 3,000 titles. Your average Blockbuster has only around 3,000 titles. This means people are renting DVDs from Netflix that aren’t commonly found at a local DVD store, they are ‘niche’ markets.

Amazon.com is the giant of online shopping. You can purchase just about anything from Amazon. You would never find a physical store that stocked as many items as Amazon online. Take this into consideration: the average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see the anatomy of the long tail image below). A substantial amount of the book sales for Amazon comes from obscure books. Amazon itself could afford to stock up on rare books as well as offer these via numerous online partners. The net effect is that a lot of book sales occurred in the long tail. This phenomenon is captured nicely in a quote from an Amazon employee: “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.“

The Anatomy of the Long Tail

The Bad Side

The more products retailers make available, the harder it is for consumers to locate the product they are interested in. In fact, consumers can become overwhelmed when choices are poorly organized and actually reduce their purchases as a result.

Thus, the Long Tail makes it critically important that retailers provide tools to facilitate the discovery of products through both active and passive search. Amazon has done this by using recommendations, top sellers, sample pages/tracks, ‘what other people bought’ etc. These active search tools can also help consumers identify products they weren’t previously aware of.

References/Links

Amazon. (2010). Amazon Homepage. Retrieved April 28, 2o10 from http://www.amazon.com/
Amazon. (2010) The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is selling less of more!. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://www.amazon.com/Long-Tail-Future-Business-Selling/dp/1401302378
Anderson, C. (2004). The Long Tail. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
Brynjolfsson, E. (2006) From Niches to Riches. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~mds/smr.pdf
Dreller, J. (2008) A Practical Guide to leveraging the Long Tail for SEM. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://searchengineland.com/a-practial-guide-to-leveraging-the-long-tail-for-sem-14998
Iskold, A. (2007). There’s No Money In The Long Tail. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blogosphere_long_tail.php
Kaw, P. (2009) 6 ways to Leverage the Long Tail in your marketing. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4723/6-Ways-to-Leverage-the-Long-Tail-in-Your-Marketing.aspx
Netflix. (2010) Netflix Homepage. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://www.netflix.com/
O’Reilly Media. (2005). What is Web 2.0?. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html
Wikipedia. (2010). Long Tail. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail
Wikipedia. (2010). Chris Anderson (writer). Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Anderson_%28writer%29
Youtube. (2006) Official Long Tail Book Promo. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlAZ9t2m7-E

Pattern Six: Perpetual Beta

nataashatorzsa — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:01:24 +0000

“Perpetual Beta is a term used to describe software or a system which remains at the beta development stage for an extended or even indefinite period of time. It is often used by developers in order to allow them to constantly release new features that might not be fully tested”

When devices and programs are connected to the internet they become ongoing services. This has a big impact on the software development cycle. When new features are ready to be released the developers can choose to release them as big releases or as incremental releases. This helps turn the users into real-time testers who can then help further shape the development of the product/program.

In the internet Era many people don’t think about the internet as a product, rather they think of it as a service. We expect these services to be there over time. We don’t expect to have to install new versions, or upgrade the service. The traditional software development cycle is changing. No longer are products just a one release thing. Software has become a service that is always improving and always changing. It has become Web Development 2.0.

For a service to be successful it has to release early and often. Many sites make updates daily and in some cases more then once a day. After some time these releases will decrease. Many websites are in the Beta stage for a long period of time or release many releases in a short period. Some internet programs currently in Beta are Safari 4 and Opera 10.52.

You can find some of the new features and tips on Safari at http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/12-tips-for-safari-4-beta.html. Below is a preview/review on Safari 4 and Opera 10.52.

The evolution of Facebook

The evolution of Facebook (2004-2009)

One site that has continued to evolve and change bases on it’s users feedback is Facebook. Facebook was founded in 2006 by Mark Zuckerberg and some of his college roommates. Facebook is currently the top social networking site and has even passed Google in visits in some continents. Facebook has undergone many changes in it’s interface design throughout the years. It has had at least 5 different interfaces in it’s 4 years of opening. Below is an image of profiles over the years showing the changes of the interfaces.

Facebook has undergone criticism over the years for it’s privacy and security. Many of these issues have been resolved and privacy setting have been one of the major changes of Facebook. Privacy on Facebook is very high. Almost every setting can be changed by the users including: photo albums, statuses, wall posts, friend requests, application settings and profile information.

Facebook is also more then just a web application, you can also use it mobile.Facebook Mobile has almost all the same features as the real Facebook. It has also undergone a few changes it its interface over the years, not quite as many as the real Facebook. Facebook Mobile is also different for Smart Phones then it is for normal ‘internet-ready’ phone on Nokias’ etc. The image below is Facebook Mobile on a Smart Phone. Facebook Mobile has less of the extra privacy features though.

Facebook Mobile Interface

The problem with Beta

The problem with using public beta testing for promotional and visibility purposes is the quality of the product is compromised. Many products labeled “beta” today are still in active, even furious development, with their programmers adding and removing features, changing the interface, and doing serious work to underlying, fundamental code. This means that there are often bugs and users cannot often by bothered using these programs/services if there are going to be many bugs involved. Some users do not want to be testers for programs, they want a fully functional, bug-free program. Many users also see Beta as a security risk, because it’s not a complete program it may be a threat to their computer.

References/Links

Apple. (2010) Safari 4 Download. Retrieved April 20, 2010 from http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
Duncan, G. (N.D). Waiting with Beta’d Breath. Retrieved April 20, 2010 from http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-328.html#lnk5
Facebook. (2010). Facebook Home. Retrieved April 20, 2010 from http://www.facebook.com
O’Reilly Media. (2005). What is Web 2.0?. Retrieved April 18, 2010 from http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=1
Cnet Download. (2010) Opera for Mac- Free Download. Retrieved April 20, 2010 from http://download.cnet.com/Opera/3000-2356_4-10921061.html?tag=mncol;txt
Wikipedia. (2010). Facebook. Retrieved April 20, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
Wikipedia. (2009). Perpetual Beta. Retrieved April 20, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_beta
Youtube. (2009). Safari Beta Review. Retrieved April 20, 2010 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzeLprsCB6w

Welcome

nataashatorzsa — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:47:42 +0000

Welcome to my Web 2.0 Blog!

This blog starts from Week 5 because i was using Tumblr before but was not able to comment on the majority of students blogs because they were WordPress blogs. To read my first 5 blogs go to http://nataashatorzsa.tumblr.com/