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Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.

Craigslist Adopting MongoDB

Craigslist logo In a big win for MongoDB and its sponsor company 10Gen, Craigslist is migrating its archives to MongoDB. In an interview on the MongoDB blog, Jeremy Zawodny of Craigslist explains that the company is moving around two billion documents into a MongoDB cluster.

Craigslist is just using MongoDB for its archive of deleted and expired posts, not for the posts that are live on the site. However, in a video presentation Zawodny made it clear that the archive is in use by the live site – it’s not just “cold storage” for old posts.

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From the introduction to the interview, here’s a run down of the problems Craigslist needed a new database to solve:

Craiglist has kept every post anyone has ever made in a large MySQL cluster. A few months ago, they began looking for alternatives: schema changes were taking forever (Craigslist’s schema has changed a couple times since 1995) and it wasn’t really relational information. They wanted to be able to add new machines without downtime (which sharding provides) and route around dead machines without clients failing (which replica sets provide), so MongoDB was a very strong candidate. After looking into a few of the most popular non-relational database systems, they decided to go with MongoDB.

For those who want more, Zawodny talks about why the company decided to add a NoSQL database, why it chose MongoDB and the challenges he’s faced during the migration in this video.

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1 million Facebook fans brings in an average of 826 likes and 309 comments per post

lego-facebook-like-button

Social media brand monitoring platform, Simplify360, explored the relationship between the number of Facebook fans and engagement level to reveal that on an average, each new post generates 826 likes and 309 comments.

The research firm took 50 Facebook fan pages with a random mix of brands from all over the world from consumer brands, to sports teams, to celebrities.

The research defines Liking Rate and Commenting Rate as the average ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ a post would generate if the number of fans for the page is normalized to one million. Only posts by the page admin are considered for the study.

Mono’s Not Dead Yet: New Startup Will Offer Support, Further Development

Mono logo Earlier this month Attachmate laid off the developers working on Mono, an open source implementation of Microsoft .NET sponsored by Novell. Attachmate acquired Novell last year.

Today Mono creator Miguel de Icaza announced the formation of a new startup to support the open source project: Xamarin.

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de Icaza wrote:

We have been trying to spin Mono off from Novell for more than a year now. Everyone agreed that Mono would have a brighter future as an independent company, so a plan was prepared last year.

To make a long story short, the plan to spin off was not executed. Instead on Monday May 2nd, the Canadian and American teams were laid off; Europe, Brazil and Japan followed a few days later. These layoffs included all the MonoTouch and MonoDroid engineers and other key Mono developers. Although Attachmate allowed us to go home that day, we opted to provide technical support to our users until our last day at Novell, which was Friday last week.

We were clearly bummed out by this development, and had no desire to quit, especially with all the great progress in this last year. So, with a heavy dose of motivation from my music teacher, we hatched a plan.

Now, two weeks later, we have a plan in place, which includes both angel funding for keeping the team together, as well as a couple of engineering contracts that will help us stay together as a team while we ship our revenue generating products.

According to de Icaza Xamarin will:

  • Build a new commercial .NET offering for iOS
  • Build a new commercial .NET offering for Android
  • Continue to contribute, maintain and develop the open source Mono and Moonlight components.
  • Explore the Moonlight opportunities in the mobile space and the Mac appstore.

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