Paul Dowman

Thomas Purves has written about how badly we’re being screwed for data access by our three mobile operators in Canada, and many people agree. He’s completely right, mobile data access is way too expensive to be generally useful. Even SMS is expensive at $0.15 (increased from $0.10 after our five carriers consolidated down to three).

I make do with a wi-fi-enabled mobile phone, but unfortunately wi-fi is not really a viable mobile alternative. Open hot-spots are few and far between (or offered by the same three amigos and priced so as not to compete with their mobile data). I’d happily pay the flat $29/month for Toronto Hydro’s OneZone, but I’m rarely inside the coverage area and it’s (by many accounts and in my own personal experience) barely usable anyway.

Canada is a great place to live for many reasons, most of which are more important than wireless data access. But the rest of the world is at the beginning of a mobile internet boom that Canadians are generally not taking part in. Who knows how many more would-be entrepreneurs from our flourishing local tech scene might be developing innovative mobile apps if they only had the opportunity to be inspired? It’s no wonder all the innovation in the mobile space comes from elsewhere.

I’m really impressed with Facebook. It’s fun (totally addictive in fact), and I think it’s actually a better way to keep in touch with friends than email.

But what I’m really impressed with is how well they’re handling a massive growth in traffic. As of Feb 23 they’ve gone from zero to almost 18 million users in just over three years, an increase of 240% since last July alone.

From the Facebook blog five weeks ago:

…almost ten million different users sign into the site every day, or more than half the user base. During our biggest peaks - Sunday & Monday night around 10EST - more than one million people will be simultaneously logged into the site.

Friendster is famous for missing a huge opportunity in part because of poor performance (40 second page load times), and MySpace’s well-known and frequent reliability problems have continually frustrated their users.

According to Alexa (as of today, April 11) Facebook’s traffic is only slightly higher than Friendster’s (who have since redesigned their architecture), and still far behind Myspace’s. (Alexa’s stats may not be that reliable however.)

Regardless of the actual numbers, they’re obviously doing the right things to keep on top of the massive growth so far. Unfortunately though, I haven’t been able to find out many technical details except that they have two terabytes of RAM used by memcached.

UPDATE April 16: Apparently their traffic increased by another 50% during the month of March! (Link via Matthew Burpee on Facebook).

I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined a new venture, I’ll be leading the development for GigPark!

GigPark is a new service that will help you recommend your favorite service providers to friends and family, instantly get service recommendations from people you trust, and build your service business through word-of-mouth. Excited yet?! Me too!!

Please check out the GigPark blog for more information.