Slide CTO: Jeremiah Robison

Dan Farber: Jeremiah, thanks for joining me.

Jeremiah Robison: Thanks for having me, Dan.

Dan Farber: Slide is part of that social networking wave and you're an applications provider, but tell me a little bit more about how you fit into this whole social networking space?

Jeremiah: Sure. Slide is the leading maker of social applications, providing such applications as SuperPoke, TopFriends, slideshows and FunSpace on a variety of social networks MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Orkut and the list goes on and on. The really interesting thing about working in this space is the rapid growth. Not only do we have our own exponential viral growth of our applications, but it's enhanced the viral nature of the social network themselves.

Dan Farber: Basically you get to ride the wave of the growth of social networks and just pour your applications wherever there is growth?

Jeremiah Robison: It's almost multiplicative where we are own our own growth that's fueled by the sort of cross social network, excitement about these applications and has led us to 170 million monthly unique visitors, which puts us in the top 10 of web properties globally.

Dan Farber: Would you say is more symbiotic than parasitic?

Jeremiah Robison: It is symbiotic. The reason that all of these social networks have gone to the model of offering value-added applications is they see what it's done for growth. Very early on, in early experiments on MySpace and Bebo, we saw the growth trends of those networks change as they added in applications and Facebook certainly has experienced a huge wave of growth around applications.

Dan Farber: I think that is one of the characteristics of what's going on right now on in technology especially around Web 2.0 and social networks which is, there is such a rapid pace of innovation and you really have to move fast. So how do you how to keep moving fast and innovating given you are surrounded on all sides?

Jeremiah Robison: The competition is actually part of what drives us. I think if there weren't people who were copying our applications, day in and day out, we might get a little lazy. As it is with all of the opportunity out there, with all of the growth of users and actually a real change in the way people are using the Internet, it's tremendously motivating and easy to keep up with the pace. Where the challenges lie, is as you get to scale you have to worry about not only about bringing in new users but making sure the old users are happy. That's where really having a solid infrastructure and really robust metrics and monitoring helps us to make sure that nothing happens that would deter from the experience.

Dan Farber: Given you're on all these different social networks, how do you maintain the application? It looks like you have to have different instances of each one for each social network, given again that there aren't standards, ubiquitous standards, that allow you to write once and play anywhere?

Jeremiah Robison: I think even if there were the "write once play anywhere", the nature of each of these social networks is quite different. What a user is doing on MySpace, a network that is a lot about self-expression, is very different than what a user is doing on Facebook, where it's all about communication with friends and as such what we try to do is keep a common backend layer. In fact, we created a very generic object model that allows us to replicate a lot of the common software problems and be able to easily create new front ends to map onto these onto this common backend

Dan Farber: You have a common backend and as I understand it you have billions and billions of objects on that backend, how do you manage to keep that scaled in terms of its growing? Are you using the cloud at all, in other words using external providers to provide you with storage and compute power?

Jeremiah Robison: Sure, yeah. As you mention we are now rapidly approaching 10 billion items in our container system--that's photos, videos, text items that people are sharing around. A lot of people use the word "cloud" to mean a lot of different things. We use edge-caching through the Akamai service to really just be an edge-cache in front of our photo storage.

Dan Farber: Basically means you get it delivered faster to the end user?

Jeremiah Robison: That's right. They have a really strong global presence here, Asia, Europe all the

different places where our service is big and a request goes first to them, to us and they cache it for as long as it takes and our miss-rate on that is really below 1%. We will actually get a call in later that we've already served to them earlier.

Dan Farber: In terms of the data centers you are using, how are you configuring them? How many servers do you run?

Jeremiah Robison: It's actually impressive what we are able to do on a relatively small amount of servers. We are at about 40 database machines and a couple hundred 1-U boxes for doing our business logic side. The way we've managed to do that it's actually to really have purpose built servers. We have one particular server just for serving up XML to all of our different slideshow widgets. That allows us to scale as needed per service because what we see is spurts of growth with each different application, so it may be that we find some new truth in how people express themselves with photos and there's a spike in the amount of image uploads that we see. Our uploading service is separated from our XML service and by making those services on commodity low-end hardware we're able to scale those up according to demand.

Dan Farber: Security is often an issue and in the case of Slide, you had an issue with your TopFriends application, where it was exposing some user data such as birthdates and gender. How are you dealing with that situation, especially on ongoing basis?

Jeremiah Robison: Sure. It's an interesting challenge as you're working in someone else's environment. Social network has its private data and we have ours, and so we ended up having a security hole that they identified. We brought in an independent security audit to go through our code after we had identified and fixed the issue in a relatively short amount of time. They audited our code to the same level and degree as you might have a financial institution's software. In fact, we used the same auditors that PayPal had used in the past. Made sure they validated all of our code and had the Facebook engineers come through, go through that report, and they were able to reinstate our application in a short amount of time.

Dan Farber: You mentioned Facebook and I think one of the challenges--you have a TopFriends application and I think that Facebook just introduced a similar kind of functionality--as a company and a business is how do you stay ahead of your partners as well as innovate at a very fast pace?

Jeremiah Robison: Sure and it wasn't the first time that we saw that. MySpace, early on, when we had a really rapid growth of slide shows, introduced their own slideshow product. It's healthy for us and it's healthy for them. You would never see either one of those networks say, we're just going to turn off that application and provide our own. We are actually competing on the same level and in the case of TopFriends, the functionality they provide is quite different than what we provide. We are actually providing a digital identity for users on Facebook that's different. It allows them to "bling" their profile out. It's slightly different so you get some of the functionality and utility of TopFriends with that application and you get a lot of the expressiveness in our application. We have to constantly innovate. We have to constantly move fast and by doing that, they are allowed to concentrate on what they do well. They have their core values in the networking of people, the bringing together of people, managing their digital feed of information, and we provide more information to go into that feed and thus the ecosystem as a whole grows.

Dan Farber: You are the CTO of the company, but I also want to ask you, how you turn those applications which are casual kinds of applications and turn them into something where you can generate revenue for your company?

Jeremiah Robison: Entertainment has long been a good moneymaking business, from movies, to television and now social networks and what we provide is a really entertaining piece of software whether it be your images streaming by, or video that you share with friends, or a sheep that you throw at your business partner. It's a great environment for advertising and what's unique about the social networking environment is, that it's socially aware. It knows your friends' interests. It knows their likes, it knows what people you've interacted with in the past, and things that you viewed. It really allows for a level of targeting that isn't really present in other forms of web media.

Dan Farber: Jeremiah, thanks for speaking with me.

Jeremiah Robison: Absolutely. Thank very much.

Dan Farber: I have been speaking of Jeremiah Robison who is the CTO of Slide. For CIO sessions, I'm Dan Farber. Thanks for watching.