I have spoken to a lot of people here in the valley who claimed that didn’t need scaling solutions early on. I have consistently said that it is important to think about scale from the beginning, not count on that it get solved down the line. Twitter is a nice concept but it is ultimately killing your earned traffic when your site has downtimes and unaccessible API:s. The downtimes due to bad architectural choices such as choosing Ruby on Rails (with known database scaling issues) have been too many and people are migrating over to a competitor Jaiku, which is more stable with less features though.
I cannot understand anyone who doesn’t think about scale for a business proposal from the beginning, especially when it comes to community/social media sites. Whoever claims to build the community without any scale in the backend from the beginning knows very little about the impact poor scale – for instance slow page loads, frequent downtimes – can have on your community. You might actually end up destroying your community totally.
Lesson learnt: Build for scale from the beginning or at least with scale in mind from the beginning and you will not have the headache. Both entreprenurs and venture capitalists should start to realize that.
Did I mention I think Twitter is over-hyped?!
