Slashdot Mirror

*laughs*

Sorry, but I put a a lot of credit in the people at google.

Maybe it signifies, like in the case of my site Slashster, that it actually IS in alpha.

The problem, I think, is what companies consider to be alpha / beta / whatnot. Alpha is when a product is still in development / testing. Beta is when the project is feature complete, and all that's going on is bugfixing.

Sites like Friendster, Tribes, Orkut, Slashster, do not have a concrete definition of "complete". There's always more functionality to add, always stuff to incorperate, and is ever-evolving. Therefore, it never gets out of alpha / beta phase.

As for my site, as long as there's no true commercial interest within my work, it will most likely stay as "alpha." Not to say that people shouldn't expect support, but rather that they shouldn't expect things to necessarily work either ;)

Yeah, some are funny. Like this guy who's had one too many mexican insanity hot peppers:
http://slashster.com/userpics/133-a.jpg

amusing as that is, there are some, look: http://slashster.com/userpics/

Well, I'm glad that the people at Orkut are working on their user system. I'm hoping that they end up making their system highly scalable.

Time for another shameless, but fairly relevant plug.

A few days ago, I posted about a new Friendster implementation I'm working on called Slashster. It's a PHP/MySQL implementation of Friendster which I've been working on for the past few weeks. I'm hoping that with some attention, that it will scale to a decent size network of people.

As stated in my first post about Slashster, it has a couple features that Friendster doesn't. It has a messageboard, and it's easier to find friends who are closer to you (1-4 degrees of separation). It also has news feeds (which I'll be adding some more fairly soon) It's also quite a bit faster for the time being, but that's obviously because it's fairly small at the moment. :)

I'm thinking about making it open source after most of the features / bugs have been worked out of it. I'm not sure whether a BSD or GPL license would be better for publishing a work like this. Any input from the slashdot community is always welcome :)

Of course, having a business model for this type of site would be useful too. After all, last I heard Friendster has roughly 50 machines for handling its traffic, and is still buckling under the weight of people going on it. I'm really curious to see if MySQL's replication could help a Friendster / Slashster type site scale well. And I'm hoping there will be a way to pay for it. Breaking even for hosting on a project like this would make me happy.

I've also had suggestions to use DB's from Oracle or IBM. There's also postgres... I'm curious to hear input on that as well.

Everyone is welcome to email me with ideas on how to make Slashster pay for itself with an open source model.

Right now Slashster is hovering around 200 users. Of course with a userbase of that size it's going to be pretty zippy even without any optimization whatsoever. I imagine things will start getting interesting around the 10,000 mark. This is, presuming that the people who come to slashster bring their friends, and there's an actual network there. I'm really hoping for something to come out of this.

I doubt that I'm ready for a slashdotting (well, at least making the front page), but in time, I'm hoping the project will grow into something useful, scalable and great user community. Only time will tell.

The support I've had so far has been pretty positive and I've met some pretty nice people from starting the site. I'm hoping to meet some more great people out of this, too.

Thank you Slashdot!

--Mark

Well, I'm glad that the people at Orkut are working on their user system. I'm hoping that they end up making their system highly scalable.

Time for another shameless, but fairly relevant plug.

A few days ago, I posted about a new Friendster implementation I'm working on called Slashster. It's a PHP/MySQL implementation of Friendster which I've been working on for the past few weeks. I'm hoping that with some attention, that it will scale to a decent size network of people.

As stated in my first post about Slashster, it has a couple features that Friendster doesn't. It has a messageboard, and it's easier to find friends who are closer to you (1-4 degrees of separation). It also has news feeds (which I'll be adding some more fairly soon) It's also quite a bit faster for the time being, but that's obviously because it's fairly small at the moment. :)

I'm thinking about making it open source after most of the features / bugs have been worked out of it. I'm not sure whether a BSD or GPL license would be better for publishing a work like this. Any input from the slashdot community is always welcome :)

Of course, having a business model for this type of site would be useful too. After all, last I heard Friendster has roughly 50 machines for handling its traffic, and is still buckling under the weight of people going on it. I'm really curious to see if MySQL's replication could help a Friendster / Slashster type site scale well. And I'm hoping there will be a way to pay for it. Breaking even for hosting on a project like this would make me happy.

I've also had suggestions to use DB's from Oracle or IBM. There's also postgres... I'm curious to hear input on that as well.

Everyone is welcome to email me with ideas on how to make Slashster pay for itself with an open source model.

Right now Slashster is hovering around 200 users. Of course with a userbase of that size it's going to be pretty zippy even without any optimization whatsoever. I imagine things will start getting interesting around the 10,000 mark. This is, presuming that the people who come to slashster bring their friends, and there's an actual network there. I'm really hoping for something to come out of this.

I doubt that I'm ready for a slashdotting (well, at least making the front page), but in time, I'm hoping the project will grow into something useful, scalable and great user community. Only time will tell.

The support I've had so far has been pretty positive and I've met some pretty nice people from starting the site. I'm hoping to meet some more great people out of this, too.

Thank you Slashdot!

--Mark

Well, I'm glad that the people at Orkut are working on their user system. I'm hoping that they end up making their system highly scalable.

Time for another shameless, but fairly relevant plug.

A few days ago, I posted about a new Friendster implementation I'm working on called Slashster. It's a PHP/MySQL implementation of Friendster which I've been working on for the past few weeks. I'm hoping that with some attention, that it will scale to a decent size network of people.

As stated in my first post about Slashster, it has a couple features that Friendster doesn't. It has a messageboard, and it's easier to find friends who are closer to you (1-4 degrees of separation). It also has news feeds (which I'll be adding some more fairly soon) It's also quite a bit faster for the time being, but that's obviously because it's fairly small at the moment. :)

I'm thinking about making it open source after most of the features / bugs have been worked out of it. I'm not sure whether a BSD or GPL license would be better for publishing a work like this. Any input from the slashdot community is always welcome :)

Of course, having a business model for this type of site would be useful too. After all, last I heard Friendster has roughly 50 machines for handling its traffic, and is still buckling under the weight of people going on it. I'm really curious to see if MySQL's replication could help a Friendster / Slashster type site scale well. And I'm hoping there will be a way to pay for it. Breaking even for hosting on a project like this would make me happy.

I've also had suggestions to use DB's from Oracle or IBM. There's also postgres... I'm curious to hear input on that as well.

Everyone is welcome to email me with ideas on how to make Slashster pay for itself with an open source model.

Right now Slashster is hovering around 200 users. Of course with a userbase of that size it's going to be pretty zippy even without any optimization whatsoever. I imagine things will start getting interesting around the 10,000 mark. This is, presuming that the people who come to slashster bring their friends, and there's an actual network there. I'm really hoping for something to come out of this.

I doubt that I'm ready for a slashdotting (well, at least making the front page), but in time, I'm hoping the project will grow into something useful, scalable and great user community. Only time will tell.

The support I've had so far has been pretty positive and I've met some pretty nice people from starting the site. I'm hoping to meet some more great people out of this, too.

Thank you Slashdot!

--Mark

Okay everyone, shameless plug time.

I am currently creating a PHP version of friendster which I call Slashster. (Yes, this is inspired from Slashdot and Friendster).

I figured that a PHP/mysql implementation would be interesting, and I'm rather curious to see how this thing can end up scaling, and if it can do it well.

I was thinking of launching this on Monday, but this slashdot story was too relevant for me to wait on it, and get some of the press on it.

Right now, its layout is nearly identical to friendster, but will change once I actually get someone with design skill to help me redo it.

There are a couple primary differences between slashster and friendster so far:

• Slashster has a messageboard. You can only see threads / post from people two degrees of separation or less from you (You, your friends, their friends). Friendster kind of had a "post-it" system on their site, which didn't have any sort of interaction on it. This aims to be a little better.
• News feeds. I'm still working on getting the XML parser working better, but I have a couple news feeds on the "main page" which are pretty much customizable.
• Moderation: Right now, people who submit new threads to the messageboard have control on moderating people up / down on those posts. The way I figure, people who want to talk about one thing will have their own corner. People who want to be irrelevant and stupid will have another corner.
• Karma. Your karma is (roughly) the sum of your moderations (slashdot style) divided by the number of days you've been on the site. This way, it'll encourage people to be there on a daily basis and contribute. Also, the amount of space you get for uploading pictures depends on your karma.
• Referrals: You end up getting more picture space for the Karma of your friends. Hopefully this will encourage people to invite others who participate, and not those who do nothing.

I'm very interested in getting input on the place. I'm still doing bugfixes on the site, as I said before, so people visiting might get the occasional parse error or two while I'm updating things.

Still, I'm looking forward to any feedback (positive and negative) on this place. I'm really hoping this post gets modded up, simply so that more people will check it out.

You can email me at the address listed with this user account. Thanks everyone.

--Mark