bigger and bigger...

I checked again and we're now at an estimated 78,500 pages talking about SceneCaster today according to Google. The good news for me (I'm expected to make sure that our service is up and operational 24/7) is that we're not doubling every day any more. From 54K to 78.5K in one day yields a daily growth rate of 1.453. Doing the math once more (can you tell I was trained as a mathematician?) with this rate of growth I have roughly 20 days ahead of me, instead of the 10 I was guesstimating yesterday, before we hit 50 million references to SceneCaster on the web. I still need to throw a heck of a lot of machines into rotation to make sure that we handle the associated growth in load appropriately, but so far we've handled the spike very well and our servers are handling the current growth without a glitch

My nightmare scenario going into this launch was that we might not be able to meet the load requirements. My nightmare scenario was definitely brought to light just before our launch. Mint.com was awarded the techcrunch top company award a week before we launched. As a result of the interest in their product their site went down under the barrage of requests.The last thing I wanted to see was a landrush of new users being able to choke our servers with their requests. We took precautionary measures using Akamai's EdgeSuite to help us absorb most of the static data serving we might get hit with and focused most of our effort on scaling the dynamic aspect of our service. That included doubling the number of database servers we expected to need for our projected growth, just in case. I look at our statistics right now and can see we were right in doing so. The load is heavy, but manageable. No outages to date.

The interesting thing that I note as I look at the growth patterns is that almost everyone jumping on the SceneCaster bandwagon right now is doing so via our main web site rather than our facebook app. The ratio of new users is about 10 to 1 main site versus facebook app. What this tells me is that the majority of new users are coming in due to the press releases (which all mention the URL for the main site and never explicitly indicate the URL for the facebook app). What I'm watching for is when that trend inverses. Once people start using it, I would expect that the major vector for new users to be existing users and the best way for that to happen is on facebook.

If we were to do this again, and this is a suggestion for those of you out there thinking to launch a service that has a facebook app component to it: publish the facebook app URL explicitly in all communications about the product. Facebook users can then directly hook in to your solution from facebook itself. It makes the startup cost minimal and lets you rely on the work that the folks at facebook have already done to validate that each user is a real human being as opposed to a spambot, so you don't have to do that validation yourself.

how big is BIG?

A week ago, before heading out to Dan Diego for the DEMO fall 2007 conference I did a quick Google search on the term "scenecaster". I got less than 200 results (before we launched the public Beta). Honestly most of those results came from functional tests we were doing to make sure that SceneCaster worked appropriately. So, I did the same search 2 days ago. I was amazed to find a bit over 10,000 results. From nothing to a fairly substantial number of results in a very short period of time. I tried again a day ago and got 22,000 results. I would have been totally blown away by those results had I not tried again today and found 54,000 results in a bit over 25 hours after the previous results... This just blows my mind. This is an illustration of the power of the viral aspect of the internet as we know it. If I assume that this trend continues and project forward 10 days, we will be at 54 million pages referring to SceneCaster. Pretty wild! Excuse me while I go order a lot of new servers....

the first blog to link to a scene

Just spotted David Cushman's post about SceneCaster:

Faster Future: Publishing possibilities now and beyond: SceneCaster.com: The moment virtual world's go mainstream?

David has gone one step beyond all the others whose posts I've found. He has not only created a scene to test out the software, he posted a link to it from his blog. That's helped me spot an issue with non registered users coming in to look at a person's scene. We'll fix that ASAP so that David, and others, can have a fully operational link!

the SceneCaster public Beta has just launched

I've been at DEMO Fall 2007 in San Diego this week for the launch of the public Beta for our SceneCaster product. We're launching both our own site at http://www.scenecaster.com/ and an associated facebook app.

It was a total blast! We had our run of last minute emergencies, including our hosting company's routing getting all messed up just the day before the stage presentation. I was at lunch with the rest of the team when the folks at the office called me to let me know that they could no longer see our servers. Talk about losing your appetite! The issue was quickly resolved with our hosting company, but it did give us all the jitters.

the SceneCaster presentation at DEMO Fall 2007

The video of Mark Zohar, the SceneCaster founder, and Michael Sanders, our expert user, doing their presentation at the conference is now available for viewing online.

Robert Scoble is covering SceneCaster on his blog as we launch the Beta at DEMO Fall 2007

It's a thrill to read the comments from Robert Scoble on his blog concerning the launch. We're really excited about his reaction to the product.