This is the UK Web Focus blog, written by Brian Kelly, UKOLN. UKOLN is a national centre of expertise in digital information management, based at the University of Bath. UKOLN is funded by the JISC.
LibraryThing Hits The Limit
Posted by Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) on 10 December 2006
A LibraryThing Blog posting informs me that recently their database contained 8,388,608 records – apparently this is half of 224, the largest number you can store in three bytes. It’s also the limit for MySQL’s “signed medium integer” (111111111111111111111111). They have now rebuilt the database – and won’t hit another barrier until they hold information on 8.4 billion books!
This is clearly a ‘cool’ service (it was also recently featured on Slashdot) . How did they succeed in being so popular? What lessons can the JISC development community learn from the popularity of the service? Any suggestions?
Phil Wilson said
Hm, well I signed up for it in October ’05, so it’s not a new thing and I think that needs to be taken into account – they’ve had lots and lots of time to accumulate those records.
In the comments it makes clear that it really only holds about 1.39 unique books.
It’s also disingenuous to suggest their whole service was featured on slashdot – a new feature was.
Surely they’re popular for the same reason as Flickr, SlideShare et al.? Niche products (dedicated audience), available to the world and well marketed? I think Amber Thomas made a similar point in the comments on a post by Andy Powell.
Phil Wilson said
er, just ignore that partial third sentence, I changed my mind about it and forgot to remove it :)
Roddy MacLeod said
I won’t be tempted into discussing what the JISC community could learn – too contentious.
Here’s another useful-looking service http://www.bestechvideos.com/
From the site’s About page:
“Welcome to BestTechVideos site! I’ve created this site because there are lots really interesting videos on the Net, but if you’d like to fine some good tech video, it is not so simple to find them because of tons of crappy “funny videos” like “funny cats” and so on.
So, If you like to attend technical conferences and watch conference sessions on video, if you like idea of screencasts, etc, then this site is for you! Stay tuned and you’ll be impressed by amount of hi-quality videos on the Net.”
Roddy