Presented by: Owen Byrne (Senior Software Engineer: Digg)

We are made up of a passionate community

Editors and reporters troll the digg homepage

Digg is readily adaptable to other content

1M + users
10M+ pages per day
15M+ Unique visitors per day
100+ servers

The “Digg Effect” has replaced the “Slashdot Effect” in the 21C

How Digg got started and grew

Developed a project spec:
Open source technologies — LAMP
Basic utilitarian design
$99/mo. Hosting

Feature Decisions

Innovation — Avoid too many features
Simple and rewarding — one click (dig, bury, #1)
Used “Ajax: where it made sense
Tools to connect to other sites (blog this, javascript widget)
Experiment: Spy, “cloud view”, visualizations (stack, swarm)

Pre-Funding (Dec ’04 — Mar ’05)

Monitoring is “someone is working on the site most of the time”
Standard LAMP architecture
Growth constrained by hardware

Growth

Paris Hilton!
Word of mouth, PR, minimal advertising, Kevin Rose

Problems

Log files
myIsam bad, innoDB good
MySQL full-text search doesn’t scale
Javascript compression

Seed Funding Investment

Kevin Rose managed to get funding to purchase a number of servers in May ‘04
Ad-hoc monitoring
One dedicated operations person

Series A Investment

$100k on servers and spares
Everyone in the same location
Operations department (currently four people)
Hire senior developers

Digg Architecture

LAMP + memcached
MySQL 5, innodb
Lucene full-text search
Digg 1.0 (Dec. 2004)
Digg 2.0 (July 2005)
Digg 3.0 (July 2006)
All software is Open Source

Conclusion

Engage with your users
Don’t forget about the business model
Be frugal — there’s always an element of luck
Think about scaling early

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