Social Networking - Problems with scaling

There's been much hype around FriendFeed recently as users get frustrated with constant outages from Twitter. According to Compete.com; Twitter is getting over a million users per month compared with Friendfeed with less than 150,000. Sites like Friendfeed have potential and gain early interest because they offer data portability. You can migrate easy access to your other accounts such as YouTube, flickr, twitter and yelp for example. Some early complaints about distributed identity and social sphere openness have been addressed by some of the newer sites. What's not understood very well is that fact that these sites perform very well when they are small. When their user base grows up to over a million or more, they start running into infrastructure brick walls. These sites are not designed for scalability up front and have to cross the chasm in terms of monetizing their assets so they can invest in real data center and web performance capabilities. Everyone wants to have Amazon or Google class performance but that's not something that can grow from a second bedroom server farm. Outages and service interruptions are becoming more commonplace, even with larger operations such as Google YouTube or Blackberry networks. Microsoft Live has suffered outages too. This is the only business where you can be the victim of your own success.