Stats
500 million page views a day
15B page views month
~20 engineers
Peak rate of ~40k requests per second
1 TB/day into Hadoop cluster
Many TB/day into MySQL/HBase/Redis/Memcache
Growing at 30% a month
~1000 hardware nodes in production
Billions of page visits per month per engineer
Posts are about 50GB a day. Follower list updates are about 2.7TB a day.
Dashboard runs at a million writes a second, 50K reads a second, and it is growing.
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This article contains just a flood of amazing stats about tumblr and its technology. I’m not kidding. If you want to know a lot of details about tumblr from one web page, this would be the one.
The One-Person Product – Marco.org
From the guy who used to build Tumblr.
(via chartier)
If you’re interested in, or just use, tumblr, read this post from marco.org. It’s really a great read. Marco is a great developer, and not a bad ‘idea man’ himself, but this particular post is about the beginnings and the maturation of tumblr, almost from day-one.
From TechCrunch:
A few months ago Tumblr let several companies know it was interested in possibly being acquired. Yahoo was the first to come to the table with a firm number, says one of our sources. They say Tumblr is apprehensive about accepting the $1.1 billion cash offer, though. Considering the much smaller, younger Instagram’s acquisition price was supposed to be $1 billion (in cash and stock, though, which would eventually make it worth less), it seems reasonable that Tumblr would view $1.1 billion cash as a lowball.
Tumblr employees have been told that the company only has enough funds to operate for a few more months, as its costs far exceed the limited revenue it earns. Tumblr pulled in $13 million in 2012, but has accelerated its advertising offering in hopes of hitting $100 million in revenue this year. The money’s not coming in fast enough to support its expenses though. Employees were recently told not to be concerned, though, because the company is expecting to be bought.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/17/tumblr-is-not-impressed/Update: A source with knowledge of the Yahoo/Tumblr discussions says they are proceeding rapidly and likely to result in an offer as soon as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer can get her board’s approval. She is said to favor an outright acquisition rather than an investment or partnership. As mentioned above, a lockup agreement prevents Tumblr from holding a bake-off with Facebook, Microsoft or anyone else.
Part of Mayer’s courtship has involved working overtime to convince Karp that his fears of being “absorbed into a behemoth” and “raided for talent and traffic” are unfounded. Karp has made it clear that he would like to run Tumblr for a long time. According to my source, he would remain CEO under the outline of the deal being worked out.
Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer thinks that what Blogger did for Google, Tumblr could do for her aging Internet company — make it relevant and a major player on the modern web. And for that she is willing to spend a billion dollars (or perhaps higher) in order to buy New York-based social publishing and sharing platform.
The news of the pending deal was first reported by AllThingsD and later Adweek reported rumors of their deal as well. At least a couple of our own sources say that the talks are serious. We have also learnt that the deal is being championed by CEO Mayer who according to Kara Swisher, has met with the team from Tumblr. We have learned that Yahoo’s New York-based corporate development team is leading the process, though like all deals, talks could fall apart. (We have reached out to respective parties for their comments, but so far we have not heard back from them. We are going to update the post to reflect their responses.)
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What could possibly go wrong?
Apple CEO Tim Cook to propose tax overhaul - The Washington Post
I don’t know if that’s even ‘likely’ true, but I doubt Cook would say it publicly if he didn’t have a solid reason to believe it. This is an interesting interview to read, and pretty brief. I’m a believer that it is shitty for companies to keep cash overseas just to avoid paying taxes (and whine like 4-year olds about tax rates, which are *not* too high, especially since most of them never pay shit), but it’s worth hearing what Cook’s suggestions are to make it easier and less expensive to get them to move that money back to the States, wherever it makes sense. (by that, i mean, there’s no reason apple or other companies should invest exclusively in the u.s.; other countries buy and sell their products, make them welcome, provide public services and infrastructure, and they should get their fair share of the cash, too. but it shouldn’t be sitting in banks in Singapore just because apple or oracle or google don’t want to pay u.s. taxes on it.)
Google to Sell Its Own Nexus Version of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 ★
Brian Chen, reporting for the NYT Bits blog:
Google on Wednesday said it would sell a version of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 running its own “stock” version of Android, not Samsung’s modified version. The device will go on sale in Google’s online store, called Play, on June 26, according to Hugo Barra, vice president of product management for Android. The phone will cost $650 and will come unlocked.
DF reader Jim Lipsey asks: Why doesn’t Google buy up a mobile device company and offer their own phone rather than resell a Samsung handset?
Great question. Why doesn’t Google do that?
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Haha!
If you haven’t vomited yet today, here’s your chance! California startups make a rap video.
As Valleywag says, “Even TechCrunch thinks this is stupid.” And that’s saying something.
Thrifty Startup by 500 Startups (Parody of Macklemore’s Thrift Shop)
(Source: youtube.com)
Once the attackers had access to one Onion employee’s account, they used that account to send the same email to more Onion staff at about 2:30 AM on Monday, May 6. Coming from a trusted address, many staff members clicked the link, but most refrained from entering their login credentials. Two staff members did enter their credentials, one of whom had access to all of our social media accounts.
After discovering that at least one account had been compromised, we sent a company-wide email to change email passwords immediately. The attacker used their access to a different, undiscovered compromised account to send a duplicate email which included a link to the phishing page disguised as a password-reset link. This dupe email was not sent to any member of the tech or IT teams, so it went undetected. This third and final phishing attack compromised at least 2 more accounts. One of these accounts was used to continue owning our Twitter account. [more + advice at the link]
Peter Belanger shooting photography for a MacWorld magazine cover (in the video), and discussing his art/commerce (at The Verge).
Facebook severed Path’s invite ability over the weekend, however, in the wake of a dust-up with a U.K.-based user who joined Path one evening before bed, only to wake up and find that Path had sent texts, e-mails and (inadvertently) phone calls lobbying his friends to join Path on his behalf.
Facebook confirmed to AllThingsD.com that it had cut off its “Find Friends” access to Path at the moment, but emphasized that users can still syndicate content from Path back to Facebook. Facebook did not address whether the restriction came as a result of Path’s recent spamming accusations, and Morin told me he didn’t know why Facebook chose to cut him off when it did.
[insert laughter here]
Path, the photo-centric social network that just hit 10 million users yesterday, has been getting some heat for what some users say are spammy tactics to recruit new users.
Digital marketer Stephen Kenwright downloaded the app earlier this week, tried it out, uninstalled it, and went to bed. When he woke up, he found that Path had gone on a rogue mission early in the morning, texting and robocalling an unknown number of his contacts, including his grandparents.
By the time Kenwright got to work, it became clear that Path had gotten in touch with his entire phone book. Coworkers, friends, and family were asking him about the text or phone call they’d received from Path, which stated that Kenwright wanted to share photos with them. “Having uninstalled the app yesterday when I decided it wasn’t for me, I’m going to go ahead and assume that Path took this data out of my phonebook sometime during the half hour I had it installed,” Kenwright said in a blog post about the incident.
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This is not the first or second time Path has fucked over its users. I don’t understand why people think the ability to share some fucking photographs with ‘friends’ is worth the complete abdication of your - and your friends’ - privacy. Who on earth wants Path texting and robocalling their friends, trying to sell them on signing up for a service that texts and robocalling their friends? Path’s only response to this? “The app is working fine, shut up.”
My data showed that the cost of a real, targeted follower on my platform was about 12 cents, versus $2.50 on Twitter Ads. According to my customers (a mix of brands and individuals) the targeting and analytics was better too. I built an API, and then a white-label version of the product, forming partnerships with other businesses.
After returning from a holiday in Australia (my home), I didn’t sign up for any classes in my second semester of NYU. I turned down my invitation to Hacker School to work full-time on my company. I was convinced that it was an opportunity that deserved 100% of my attention.
The elephant in the room, whose deafening footsteps I’d been trying to ignore, was my relationship with Twitter and its revenue model. Surely, I was in violation of the terms of service. I noticed new customers sending me messages like “this is so much better than Twitter Ads”. Gulp.
In a heartfelt note posted to its official blog, Reddit, which is not known for its candor about its weaknesses, apologized for its driving role in the dumb vigilante justice that swept up the internet in the wake of the Boston Marathon Bombing, which in its worst moment mislabeled missing Brown student Sunil Tripathi a suspect. [more]
This is such good news.
