Alexis Smirnov

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Jacob Kaplan-Moss, co-author of Django and it\’s excellent excellent documentation writes a series titled Writing Great Documentation.

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A great and refreshing perspective to evaluate services by the number of people who actually use it. Key point: \”there are 1.6 to 6 million people actively using Facebook right now.\”

So Facebook is a \”communication platform\”, right? If so, I can\’t help, but contrast this number with with the amount of people who are using email for one-to-many communications. I\’m not even talking about one-to-one forms of communications such as SMS and voice.

There are Over a Million People Actively Using Facebook Right Now

via O'Reilly Radar – Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. by Ben Lorica on 9/24/09

A little over a week ago Facebook reached a major milestone: 300 million active users. The fastest-growth region continues to be Asia, but growth in other overseas regions such as the Americas and Africa have also been strong. Currently reaching only 1% of potential users in Asia and Africa, Facebook has barely scratched the surface in both regions:

Growth in the U.S. remains fastest among those age 45 and older, and the share of those users is higher in the U.S. than overseas. In other regions recent growth tended to be more evenly divided among age groups. One notable exception has been the teen group in Asia, which grew over 80% in the last 12 weeks.

Of the 300 million users, how many are actively using Facebook right now? (For the rest of this post active means not just logged in, but actually engaged.) By treating the previous question as a Fermi problem^†, I can probably derive a decent estimate. First, I assume that the average fraction of people actively using Facebook at any moment, equals the fraction of time an average Facebook user is active on the site^††. Without access to any usage stats, I\’ll throw out the following guesstimate: a typical Facebook user spends 4 hours per month (or 48 per year) actively using the site.

Depending on how accurate you want to be, there are 1.6 to 6 million people actively using Facebook right now. If the average Facebook user spends considerably more than 4 hours per month (actively) using the site, the estimate would be much higher than a 1.6 million. I do have an escape clause: in classic Fermi problems, being within a factor of 10 is considered acceptable.

(†) Increasingly popular in the business world, Fermi problems have long been staples in Physics (and Math) departments.
(††) In other words, if the average Facebook user spends 1% of her time actively using the site, on average 1% of all Facebook users are actively using the site at any given moment.

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I especially like the fact that the test is reproducible on any other cloud/schemaless document database, which would make it easy to create a compatision benchmark.

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http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/

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EC2 users (that is just about every startup outthere) woke up to a great news this morning. It is now possible to buy a year or 3 years worth of EC2 instance time.

You can get a much cheaper EC2 instance if you’re willing to make 1 year or 3 year commitment. 1 year commitment costs $325 and 3 year commitment costs $500. That’s about 27$ per month compared to 76$ you’d pay today. A 35% discount. A fair deal IMHO.

At first glance this feature seems to be designed for those 27/7 non-elastic instances such as database servers, web site front ends etc. Actually, reserved instances are worthwhile for elastic compute resources such as batch jobs or queue-based workers. Why? Because you don’t commit and pay to a calendar year of running your instance. You commit and pay for the net year-worth of CPU time. This means you can shut-down an instance and stop the clock, just like with regular EC2 instances.

For a larger operations this feature meets a different use-case:

Also, quite a few customers actually told us something even more interesting: they were interested in using EC2 but needed to make sure that we would have a substantial number of instances available to them at any time in order for them to use EC2 in a DR (Disaster Recovery) scenario. In a scenario like this, you can’t simply hope that your facility has sufficient capacity to accommodate your spot needs; you need to secure a firm resource commitment ahead of time.

Way to go AWS team. This is the way to keep earning the position in of the leading cloud computing provider.

But you’re done yet. The problem? The model of reserved instances put EC2 users back into the business of provisioning planning. How many instance/years should I buy for the next year? How many is too many? EC2 are still unable to to spread the 1 year time credit over multiple instances. In principle, it costs the same to run one instance for 1000 hours than to run 1000 instances for one hour. In practice, the current model makes it impossible to capture the discount. What is needed is to able to buy a year worth of CPU time at discount, and then be free to launch as many instances as needed to use up the time credit.

Pradeep Elankumaran asks and answers the question Why XMPP will be huge very soon.

It occurs to me that I need to qualify my support of the statement “Just use HTTP” in the context of emergence of XMPP as the standard way to support real-time messaging between systems.

XMPP will shine when existing web apps start using it and that will happen by way of comet. For example of things to come checkout FrienFeed Real-time API. In order words, just use HTTP

It appears Nokia is neck-to-neck with other players in the race amongst Apple followers. About a year after Apple announced the AppStore Nokia follows suit with Ovi Store. Nokia, though its online service brand Ovi offers the same deal – developers get to keep 70% of gross profits from the sales of apps. RIM says it will be ready “next spring”. Microsoft and Google rushed with their App Store announcements.

Ovi offers an impressive set runtimes for applications:

• Java™ technology:
  • Sun Java™ Wireless Toolkit for CLDC (Java ME)
  • JRE
• C++:
  • Symbian C++
  • Open C/C++ Plug-ins for S60 3rd Edition
  • C++ for maemo
• Qt for S60 (technology preview)
• Python:
  • Python for S60
• Flash:
  • Flash Lite from Adobe
  • Flash CS4
• Web Runtime (WRT):
  • Nokia WRT Plug-in for Aptana Studio

The inclusion of Flash is important since it will put pressure on Apple to follow suit and hopefully provide developers a common runtime across devices.

This news needs to be considered in the context of recent discussions between Facebook and Ovi. One thing is to put up a store and leave it to application developers run their own cloud service to support their application. It is entirely another story to augment the application platform with a cloud platform that is offered as part of the platform.

• Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

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