Bay Area Startups and Technologies Marina's Web Scale Coral Reef

The Facebook and OpenSocial meetup last night was a nice networking event and the organizers hosted a presenter of one of the most popular (#5) Facebook apps. The topic spanned across various aspects of the Facebook application development and specific features of Green Patch. That included user self-expresssion, ability to obtain credit for caring for someone's patch, and its eco-friendly motif with regards to helping the environment and help in case of the natural disasters. David King, who is the main author of the app, gave audience a perspective on the evolution of the app and how end users steered the original features and designed towards what the site is today. There are over 5mln users of the app which is pretty cool. He also addressed some of the technical aspects of the application with regards to its architecture and technology utilized. It includes PHP, MemchacheD, MySQL, LightHTTPD ("lighty"), and the app is deployed on Amazon EC2 cloud with some usage of S3 for image caching.

While I've been busy attending local events and working with startups, I finally got a minute to blog about some of the events that stood out. Last night's VLAB EVENT - Lifestreaming: The Real-time Web event had quite interesting and colorful set of panelist. Panelists included Bret Taylor, Co-founder of FriendFeed, Loic Le Meur, Founder of Seesmic, Jeff Clavier, Founder of Softtech VC, Leah Culver, Co-founder of Pownce. Kara Swisher, Wall Street Journal editor, did a great job moderating the event. She was entertaining and quite provocative. Here is her capture of the event if you're interested in watching the entire panel discussion.

Some of the questions and topics were popular and you hear them all the time, such as what's the success criteria for a startup and how do you define your business model. There was a hot debate over whether we continue to see proliferation of the chat sites, video streaming sites, and other similar sites, or whether there will be consolidation of similar ones and major industry players will win over the smaller ones, and there will be just a handful of sites, same as we see with search engines today. Kara was of the opinion, and I tend to agree, that the latter paradigm wins. But Leah brought up the point that every site has its own flavor and depending on user preferences and interests, many of them can co-exist.

Last thing I want to mention is an interesting thought Bret shared with the audience around how to turn your application into a killer app, or what should people consider when building open a social application. The key success factor, highlighted by Bret, lays in ability to measure a product feature in a quantitative or other way, e.g. Google AdWords. I think this is a fundamental criteria that doesn't implicitly come to mind when rolling out an open social app - being able to implement an application feature in such a way that you can go back at any given time obtain a quantitative statistics on it, a very interesting concept, and sure makes a lot of sense.