Professional PHP

Well I had hoped that more information would come out about Friendsters Java to PHP conversion (1 2 3). Sadly, I don’t think thats going to happen. It seems that Troutgirl has been fired for talking about the conversion in her blog.

This is a lesson in how not to handle public relations. The first story was a technical story of interest to a limited number of geeks about how friendster managed to improve their service for their users. Sure it publicized that friendster was slow, but only in the context of having fixed the problem. It didn’t reveal anything that wasn’t public knowledge, except that the friendster programmers were competent and that they had tried many things to make the site faster.

Now friendster has ironically managed to turn this story into one of general interest to a larger group of socially well connected people accompanied by a call to action to unsubscribe from Friendster. Bloggers do seem to like to blog about blogging. Its already being covered by blogs that would never dream of talking about the scalability merits of PHP and Java. Its #3 on daypop as I write this and it hasn’t been on slashdot yet.