Scaling Bumper Sticker: A 1 Billion Page Per Month Facebook RoR App

highscalability.com

11 pointspbnaidu5 comments

All of my female friends from college love sending these little images back and forth to one another, and while it's a very simple idea, it seems to be extremely popular.

However, in my experience, the Bumper Sticker app is often very slow and clumsy to use. Ironically, I often use it as an example when speaking of Facebook apps that don't do a particularly good job of scaling.

"Monetizing Bumper Sticker" would be an interesting article too :).

From the article:

Bumper Sticker was an experiment to see how fast the Light Engineering Development (LED) team at LinkedIn could build a Ruby on Rails Facebook application.

Based on that quote, I don't think they had a financial goal with it... although now might be a good time to think of one.

$25k/month burn rate on Joyent. I don't see any obvious applications to LinkedIn which is what makes me curious in how long they will sustain it. I think they could sell it to Slide, Inc. or one of the other Facebook companies.

Hopefully the Greater Fool theory will work in their favour.

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