Andreessen On Facebook

The idea that Facebook could become a, "social operating system for the internet," struck me as a good aspiration.  But apparently it's more than just PR.  In fact, Marc Andreessen calls it, "a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry". And let's face it, he should know.  "A successful application on Facebook can grow to a million users or more within a couple of weeks of creation", he says on his new blog.  "ILike was the first third-party application to get serious lift-off on Facebook.  Quoting from ILike's blog shortly after their launch, "In our first 20 hours of opening doors we had 50,000 users sign up, and it is only accelerating. (10,000 users joined in the first 12 hrs. 10,000 more users in the next 3 hrs. 30,000 more users in the next 5 hrs!!)".  Andreessen goes onto warn that, "Unless you already have, or are prepared to quickly procure, a 100-500+ server infrastructure and everything associated with it -- networking gear, storage gear, ISP interconnetions, monitoring systems, firewalls, load balancers, provisioning systems, etc. -- and a killer operations team, launching a successful Facebook application may well be a self-defeating proposition."