Facebook is launching the new Usernames feature in the next half hour, but it did not come easy. We are live here at FacebookFacebook
headquarters for the launch of Facebook usernames. I spoke with Jared Morgenstern (Product Manager) and Guy Rom (Manager for the Commerce and Payment System Engineering Team) about the Facebook usernames. We learned several very interesting tidbits about the Facebook username launch. Here, in a nutshell, are some key points:
- Facebook may go down: According to both Jared and Guy, Facebook may experience so much load at one time that it may in fact go down. The load could be magnitudes higher tonight, and is slowly rising in anticipation of the virtual land grab. However, they say this is highly unlikely, for the reason below:
- They adjusted the site to accept the load for tonight: They removed some high CPU-draining features and made the Facebook Usernames page very simple to handle the load.
- Facebook has a last resort option if this happens: If the site experiences so much traffic that it threatens to bring it down, Facebook has a final option: to transform the homepage into the username page.
- They decided against an auction system because of load: A straight-up auction system was considered and scratched when they realized this auction would be bigger than any auction eBay ever had. Imagine 30 million users bidding within one minute. That’s why there’s no auction.
- They built a VGC/Vickery-based auction system, but scratched it: They considered an auction system that would take a week to finalize, but decided against it because users would be angry about paying for any feature and the Vickery system would be too confusing for many users.
That’s it for now. Until 8:30, here are some pictures:
