New Delhi Times

People Aggegator is live now. No more invites needed. Come on over!

Techcrunch profiles People Aggregator.

OK People Aggregator survived for almost a day without going down. Trust me, that is a big deal for an application fresh off the kiln and suddenly getting used by hundreds of people at the same time. Then the phone rang at 6 in the morning. The site was down. Fortunately the team had a good handle on how to fix the issue. In the last one and a half year since we launched Ourmedia, we have gone thru a few releases. My big grouse at Microsoft used to be that we never seemed to ship anything (and what I was working on is still several months away from shipping!). So I always enjoy the end game of a product cycle. Its a race against time and Murphy’s law seems to go into overdrive. In the end there is of course the feeling of satisfaction having created something that gets widely used. For the last one week, I have been working till almost 2 in the night and then starting the day early by 6 or 7. But I am so “in the zone” right now that I am thoroughly enjoying it. However, needless to say I am starting to get just a little bit exhausted. So if I have been unresponsive on email or not returned a few calls, please bear with me!

We partially lifted the covers off of People Aggregator today by sending out a bunch of invites. A few hundered people have signed up and the system is starting to look like a real community. It is VERY EXCITING to see people use what you have built. It is also an extremely high pressure time because I am constantly monitoring how people are using the system, what kind of bugs are cropping up and in general how the feedback is. The dev team is working in top gear cranking out bug fixes faster than i can type them out We then move the fixes on to a staging server where the QA team validates them and makes sure we didn’t break anything else in the process. Then we move the code on to the live server. I think in today’s web 2.0 world, incorporating user feedback in real time has become almost a requirement. Users are lot more demanding today and the its a “beta” excuse can be used only so often!
Last few days have been very hectic for the entire team across several continents. Of course we are on the home stretch now leading upto the official launch at Gnomedex
Exciting times these!.

Raju has an excellent post about People Aggregator on his blog. The upcoming release of People Aggregator is what keeps me awake at nights these days! The team is working very hard and it is THE biggest and most complex project most of the dev team has ever worked on. Besides, we are a truly global team with us in Gurgaon, India, Phil in New Zeland, Martin in Germany, and Marc , MarcS and rest of the BBM gang in California. One day I will write in great detail the challenges and advantages of doing such extreme distributed development. But first we gotta ship some code!

I was part of a panel discussion around social networking on a BBC radio program called Four Corners last night. You can listen to the audio here
This was the first time I was on radio and it was an interesting experience. It is truly weird to hear your own voice!

Ourmedia has over 20,000 uploads now. Here is the breakdown as of today
Total media uploaded: 20045
Videos: 9633
Audios: 5966
Images: 3902
Texts: 544
We also crossed 30,000 users recently. So 30,000 users have uploaded 20,000 pieces of media. That indicates to me that we have a community that is very active. Its not like a lot of people came, signed up and then never returned. That has been an issue with social networks in general. With Ourmedia, we have a managed to create a social network which is focussed on a specific interest area and hence has retention.
We also did a major upgrade of Ourmedia a few days back. In particular now we support RSS with enclosures and media RSS feeds per user and also allow users to create their own groups. Come, join the Tekriti group!

Last few days were quite a learning experience. On Friday, Ourmedia server went down and the site was inaccessible. At first look, it appeared that the apache logs had filled up beyond the 2GB limit. So we promptly reset the logs and the server was up again. Only to go down within half an hour. Memory usage climbed to 99% of available memory which caused mysql to crash. This led to a few corrupted tables as well. Which caused the apache error log to fill up very fast. Which caused apache to seg fault. Hence the vicious circle. It wasn’t clear why we were getting this increased load all of a sudden. We did several restarts but within 30 mins, the memory usage would peak out and mysql would crash. More than a day went by like this with server load peaking within minutes and then requiring a restart.
Finally on Sunday, while skyping with Jeff (lead moderator for Ourmedia), we figured out what was happening. Jeff had freed up disk space day before yesterday by (rightly) deleting the temporary media files. But it looks like Google had indexed those images and/or people had linked directly to those images. In particular, an image of Lindsay Lohan was getting very high number of hits. Now with the image removed, Drupal (the CMS which is used by Ourmedia) started returning 404 errors which were getting logged into watchdog. Watchdog ended up with 6.8 million entries in a single day. I think that was causing excessive memory usage and mysql crashes. As a temporary fallback, I changed the code to stop logging anything into watchdog. Since then things have cooled down and we have a uptime of 30 hrs (and counting).
It was quite an experience in systerm administration – something that I have not done much before. The biggest lesson I learnt was that what seems like the obvious cause of a problem is often merely a symptom of something more serious underneath. We still haven’t gotten to the bottom of this but now we know where to look!
Thanks Linday Lohan
PHM@

There is so much talk about social networking these days and how everybody is trying to figure out a viable business model. Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, Tribe all get talked and written about every day. But nobody mentions what I believe is the world’s most successful social network. Its shaadi.com Its an Indian matrimonial site and has many social networking features. I heard their ad today on the radio and they claim that 500,000 of their members found their match on their website. That is NOT 500,000 dates, that is 500,000 marriages! If that is not successful, then I don’t know what is.
Matrimony is big business in India and for a country with a very large foreign resident population, internet provides an easy way to connect with people back home. When it comes to marriage, trust becomes a key issue. Social networks have trust built into them. When you connect to somebody who is n degrees away from you, there are n-1 intermediaries (whom you trust) who can vouch for that person. Shaadi.com doesn’t harness that trusted network. And I think that is an oppurtunity to create an interesting social networking application.

[Via Marc] Google has come up with its personalized homepage ala My Yahoo or MSN. As Marc points out, its beginning of the next generation of portal wars. One thing I really liked about the Google portal is the ability to customize layout using drag-n-drop.
If you think about any of the “my *” services from Yahoo, MSN or Google, they are in the end content aggregators. How many sources of content a particular service can support might become a differentiating factor. Of course in an ideal world with open standards, it would become a non-issue. Another thing of interest is who will take the lead in allowing people to not just aggregate, but create content as well?
On one end we have blogger (which is really google), typepad, Ourmedia etc which allow you to publish content. On the other extreme are all these portal services which allow aggregation. When (and where) shall the two meet?