Jared Kim’s Weblog

YouTube’s head engineer gave a talk at Google about the scaling strategies they employed during their growth. This video clocks in at almost 1 hour and covers every single part of web scalability I can think of: web, database, file, and more.

Hey all,

The Associated Press wrote an article about Stalkerati and social networks earlier this week and it had a lot of quotes from me. It got syndicated to places like NY Times, USA Today, BusinessWeek, and many many others. I’ve been getting a ton of e-mail regarding Stalkerati, so I just want to write a blog post that answers a few common questions.

• Stalkerati was a fun project that I made last year in May 2006. I pretty much stopped working on it by the end of June 2006 because I could not do searches on MySpace or Facebook after they implemented certain changes to their respective sites. However, even though I stopped working on Stalkerati in May 2006, I would still get sporadic interview requests from reporters every 1-2 months.

• Yes, I could have written a web crawler/spider to make it work on MySpace and Facebook, but I felt like it wasn’t really worth it. I don’t believe you can build a company that piggyback’s on another company’s data unless their is a formal way of doing it via an API or something. However, I consider Widgets & slideshow services a total different thing due to the fact they are not relying on user data that belongs to other companies. Therefore, they still have a stable market (unless MySpace wants to block them).
• I am no longer actively working on Stalkerati as of June 2006 (wow its been a year:). In January of 2007 I launched Yaqqer.com while in my freshmen year of college at UC Berkeley. In March 2007, I left UC Berkeley to start my 3rd company. I can’t say too much about what my newest company is going to do, but I can tell you that if you play video games on your PC, you’re going to (hopefully) like it a lot I have some awesome and experienced people working with me on this one, so I’m pretty excited.
• Yea, I know Stalkerati doesn’t work on Safari. If I remember correctly, it’s because Stalkerati uses the onLoad event on its iframes, and Safari does not support that event.

Hopefully that answers some questions. If you still have questions or just want to say hi, you can use the contact form on my About page.

Just in case you missed it, Google Maps just added Streets view to their list of view modes.

Here’s a link to the Street view of my old dorm building at Berkeley. Right now it seems to be working in certain cities in the Bay Area, NYC, and a few other major cities.

Mahalo is a pretty cool new search engine from Jason Calacanis that has human-powered search results for over 4000 topics as of now.

I don’t know how many people who read my blog fit this criteria, but I’ll give it a shot…

I’m looking for a Flash programmer to help me on my current startup on a freelance basis. Please use the contact form on my About page to contact me. Please include some info on the work you’ve done.

Thanks!

Hmm, so China’s largest MMOG gaming company Shanda plans to launch a Second Life clone. They definitely know the market and demographic, which most foreign companies lack. With this knowledge + distribution network + their huge user base == i think will be successful chinese Second Life clone.

“Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks With Geeks”

Four interns are brought into Manhattan and given 12 weeks to design, develop, debug and ship a program that will change the way computer … all » geeks around the world fix their friends’ computers. Boondoggle Films presents a journey through the world of software development from the perspective of a unique upstart, four quirky interns, and the world of The Geek.

Filmed at Fog Creek Software (Joel Spolsky’s company) during their development of Copilot.

One thing I wish I did when I ran my first startup in China was take more pictures of the whole journey. I took exactly 0 pictures the whole time.

Fortunately one of my kickass lead developers Andrew Bright snapped a bunch. Click here to see the whole album!

This time around I’m definitely going to document the whole thing in pictures. I recommend you do to, whether you’re starting a company or just chilling in college. It’s really nice to look at pictures 2-3 years later!

April 18, 2007: Filed my papers with my adviser at UC Berkeley to officially take my leave of absence.

April 20, 2007:  Moved all my stuff from my tiny dorm room in Berkeley to a pretty nice place in the SoMA district of San Francisco. I used to live in SoMA before going off to college, so really I’m moving “back” to SF.

Rest of 2007: ???

2008 and Beyond: PROFIT!!!

I’m taking a leave of absence to pursue an idea that I’ve had in my mind for awhile. I started thinking about it seriously about 2 months ago, but the real work began about a month ago. I can’t say too much about it right now, but things are going very well. Expect some exciting announcements sometime soon

Just had my interview with TheCulturalConnect go live yesterday. Check it out!