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Facebook's scale problem?

I have close to 5000 friends in my facebook account. Facebook does not allow me to add more friends. I guess they have design issues related to this.

Let me give you and example. If I want to do something (say tagging a photo) which requires a list of names, it is so slow. It tries to download the list of all friends that I have (including their icons / avatars). I could imagine what 5000 friends will do. This is even worse with slow internet connection like what I have (and perhaps what other people have in developing regions).

Imagine if I have 10.000 friends :) and this is possible. I've been ignoring friend requests because I just couldn't add more friends. Currently there are more than 500 requests waiting. Almost all of them are legitimate requests. And why I get all these friend requests? Well, I hate to admit it but I do quite a bit of talk (to univesities' students, etc.) and in each talk there are more than 100 people. If 10% of them want to be friends with me, than 10.000 friends is within reach.

And I'll have more (scalability) problems ...

Clearly there should be a better way to do this. I don't know whether somebody in Facebook is looking at this.

Comments

Arif said…
I saw the presentation of behind-operation-whale of Twitter, they seemed to manage in queues of event instead of queries (assuming FB is using the later). The full-blown FB web interface might've been designed for places with bandwidth luxury (?)
Tikno said…
So, FB should change their motto to connecting people until 5000
Budi Rahardjo said…
I guess the majority of users will never face like this. But, still ... it needs to be redesigned.
nice article....
keep movin

padepokan sabdo langit
Liu benz said…
Blogs are nice, Mr. / Mrs who owns the blog, Sending Your Link to B3N7Y BLOG, May drowsy?
Greetings and thank you ..
grahainfo said…
if you want more than 5000 connection, use facebook page

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