One of the least considered aspects of Social Networking sites around the build VS buy decision.

Social Networks are a process, not a product. When you're building a Social Networking application, your actually looking to enguage customers - all of your value comes from repeat interaction with eyeballs. When you're considering building a Social Networking application, you really need to be cognicent of the value of feature release.  read more »

There seems to be a hell of a lot of confusion about the differences between performance, scalability and high availability. They're often mixed but they're never the same.

So what are the differences?

High availability means that you exceed the required uptime for the application you are running. Generally, it's measured in "9's", as in 99.9% uptime, 99.99% uptime or the overly discussed "five nines" - 99.999% uptime. This is a deep subject, and something we'll discuss another time. So, let's move into the other two.  read more »