Building Massively Scalable Facebook Application
Avril has over 40 Million Facebook fans! So launching any application for Avril requires certain scalability and performance considerations. Will the application be able to handle large amounts of traffic in a short periods of time? Will backend and media servers support the amount of user generated content being submitted by fans? Will the application work well in an international environment? Do the rules or guidelines allow non-US fans to have some level of participation? These are the types of question we ask (and solve) for global music artists on a regular basis. We have built and deployed scalable Facebook and Twitter applications for some of the biggest artist names on Facebook including Rihanna (67M), Eminem (67M), Lady Gaga (55M), Justin Bieber (52M), Avril Lavigne (40M), Usher (37M), and One Direction (14M) - several of which are in the top 20 largest Facebook pages (20% of the 20). We have also build application for non-music clients such as South Park (45M) that command huge amounts of fan traffic!
Video User Generated Content
Our latest application for Sony Epic recording artist Avril Lavigne (See http://www.facebook.com/avrillavigne?sk=app_167484670071817) is designed to collected user generated content (UGC) to create a lyrics video for her new song "Here's to Never Growing Up". This app allows fans to either record live video of themselves mouthing the words to the song on their webcam, or to upload photos of themselves "never growing up". Because of scalability concerns, these were the best two options available (video upload is supported but doesn't scale very well because of the file size of video uploads, while the webcam provides the most bandwidth-friendly approach for campaigns of this size). Built-in size limits and a special uploader that resized large photos on the fly ensured that photo uploads would also scale well during periods of high traffic.
Japanese-Language Support
Because of the large number of Japanese fans Avril has, management decided (at the last minute) that application needed to support Japanese language fans in their native Kanji (see below). Working with our translation partner Gengo, we we able to translate the application in less than 12 hours.
