Ask YC news: What happened to socialmoth?
From some of my recent posts there - seems like the site died. I know there's the facebook app, and I know they're working on overhear.us
But where did the users go??
But where did the users go??
we had about 20k more users come in and use socialmoth than we expected the other day. that is MORE, not total. up until that point, the dot-com and the fb app were working on the same server and using the same database.
my focus has been entirely following the users, and the users are on facebook. also i should follow the money, and that is also facebook. i moved the fb app to a new set of servers sunday, but i haven't moved the dot com to the same servers yet.
i plan an relinking them soon, but i've been scaling again since then. and learning about proxy balancers (nginx vs mod proxy balancer vs haproxy - if anyone wants to give advice)
rkabir, if you ask a specific question about flow, i can tell you want i know and can make public. the sites popularity was due to the facebook users. nothing i made scaled well enough for the new popularity and i haven't gone back and redone all of the dot com code to match the facebook scaled/optimized code.
omouse, do you use socialmoth? new features are on the way. they are done, but not publicly shown yet. also, my facebook users are dying for new features and suggesting them, but they realize there is a lot of scaling work to do. (i love how nice my users are) sometimes you just need to take a break and make new stuff though.
I haven't compared the various load balancers, but have you considered pound? It's small, lean, mean and easy to set up.
with mongrel: http://swiftiply.swiftcore.org/mongrel.html
balance=1
of the boxes, the first box always has a much higher load.
(disclaimer: i totally miss the old school socialmoth.com and the community without any facebook - but if fb is where it's at, then fb is where it's at. i was the one who posted a couple times that i was glad you put ads on sm - i REALLY like the site / concept)
it seems (at first glance) that the facebook app has less comments / conversations based on posts than the main domain - is this something you've seen from an aggregate perspective?
otherwise, it seemed (from a user's perspective) that sm had this core set of users in the beginning - i read about it on techcrunch, etc. and then when the facebook app came out - all hell broke loose (not to mention "love inflation"). I'm guessing facebook caused a near-exponential spike in users?
also - props on overhear.us - looking forward to enjoying it as well.
the fb app has a different feel because of the high volume of posts. it is almost impossible to refind a post. we have notifications, but just not enough, and nothing as good as the old socialmoth.com. working towards it though.
the first week socialmoth on facebook was out, it doubled every 29 hours.
the most common feature request is "negative hearts" whatever that means.
depending on your (my) mood - sometimes there's a post that needs to be unloved. but i think if you implemented that - most posts would be in the negative hearts.
unsolicited feature ideas to keep things relevant(knowing that scaling, etc are way more important):
let me subscribe to people, while still keeping things anonymous. some posts i really like, etc - that can be used to mix in a higher number of their other posts with my main consumption (if you're not already doing this).
similarly - let me ignore people. you could have some algorithm-fu to keep track if i hit ignore on the same person multiple times - for a real ignore, rather than just a bad post.
i also imagine an overhear.us facebook app is in the works? :)