One other thing: Becca J. @35, we don’t delete content unless it’s commercial spam. Maybe you hit a bug? You can find me at http://www.fastcompany.com/user/95053 if you’d like to tell me more about the problem. I promise I’ll look into it.

Publishing dynamics have changed significantly. Content is king and in our model we actually share 40% with the writers. In a typical print model, approx. 5-6% of total revenue (established publication) goes to the editorial line. That includes overhead, benefits, phone, etc. We believe that model doesn’t fly anymore and is perhaps why so many print publications are failing.

It’s all about quality writers. Writers drive content. Content drives revenue. We believe this give the writers a large share of the pie. In fact, our founding editors are shareholders.

This model is scalable and we’ve already started expanding into other areas, and yes…we’re only a week old.

Scott

regards,
Graeme

Drupal is a highly mature system for building social networking and portal sites. Why re-invent the wheel when a platform is available already? It would probably take twice as long to build the whole system from scratch.

There is a reason why Warner Brothers and Universal Studios have chosen Drupal for their sites.

Also, Drupal development really shouldnt involve hacking, there is a complete system for over-riding the core functionalities. There is also pretty much 1 module for every functionality. All that one needs to do is over-ride some of these functionalities.

Arnold

I did go back… and later found that my comments had been deleted. I thought the point was to allow people to have their voices heard?

Ed does have a point that being part of FC’s social network might give business-obsessed bloggers another outlet for their voices, but who knows how that will translate out for those bloggers. Will it give them more audience and more eyeballs? Only the blogger’s stats will tell the truth to that tale.

I question if being innovative for innovations sake is the best strategy for Facebook

I’ve done a thorough analysis of the initial launch here:

http://www.web-strategist.com/.....community/

Mike - why do you let Erik post this crap.

People use facebook and read news from the web. Tony Perkins tried GoingOn a similar product as Fastcompany. That failed. Now who needs another GoingOn.com failure.

Paul
fastcompany.com

Shame all I can see this morning is “Sorry. Something seems to have gone wrong. Our team has been notified and they’re on the case. Thanks for being patient!”

Pam

I’d recommend asking the developers to turn on JS aggregation and expires headers. That should help speed up things for readers on slow connections and decrease the load on servers.

BTW, do people like red headlines?

Ed Sussman from FastCompany.com here. Dan, I think most people who blog do so because they want their voices to be heard. Only a handful make their living at it — most do it because they love it. FastCompany.com now allows people who care especially about business issues and innovation to find a bigger audience than they probably otherwise would have. And it’s an audience of like-minded people who really care about business, think its important to the world, and that it adds meaning to their lives. So that’s why people might want to blogging or engaging on the site in discussions with our dozens of writers and editors.

On the tech front, loads of traffic today so we hit a few problems with the servers. But we have a pretty large team of developers addressing issues. Indeed, as noted, the platform is Drupal, which is the cutting edge open source CMS these days. We were lucky enough to have Lullabot working with us all though the project — and they literally did write the book. Matt Westgate, one of the partners, is the co-author of Pro Drupal Developers, the main text about Drupal.

Matt, others from Lullabot, and our other dev shop Achieve, and my internal team were working through performance issues starting right about 4 a.m. ET, after we pulled the switch. It’s one thing to test on private beta with 10,000 participants and quite another to throw upon the door to hundreds of thousands. Load testing can’t predict everything. Some stuff worked perfectly well — like the member directory search you pointed out Dan — but became strained as our servers were pushed to the brink. It’s fixed again. Putting out small fires.

We’re pushing to the limit what a modern content management system can do — dynamically generating millions of pages of user and archival content, being updated every few minutes, and personlized for every user! It’s actually quite breathtaking that this stuff can be done. The underlying technology is amazing. Having a grand public debut isn’t the way most websites come to be — Facebook had quite some time before millions of people started poking around. So we’re both fortunate and unfortunate to be in the spotlight.

I encourage you to come back, Becca. There’s some amazing journalism — try Ellen McGirt’s piece on Facebook — the first national magazine to put Zuckerberg on its cover.

http://www.fastcompany.com/mag.....ceo_3.html

Or Chuck Salter on the debate on the ethics of bottled water.

http://www.fastcompany.com/mag.....ottle.html

Chances are, every time you return, you’ll find more rough patches with the technology smoothed over. And more and more features turned on. Beyond question, you’ll find great journalism.

Nice try… I doubt I’ll be back…

One part that does not make a lot of sense to me: Fast Company encourages you to start your own blog on their site. But most of the people with the most interesting ideas *already have their own blogs*. And why would a key influencer whose just starting a blog choose to affiliate with Fast Company to help them make a profit (rather than run an independent free blog, for which it will take more time for the accretion of readers, but will maintain your editorial independence)? Am I missing something?

Also, browsing members by Topic, Region or Industry does not work (which seems a little shabby, for a site that’s touting it’s technological prowess: cutting edge Drupal maybe, but missed basic QA…)

I’ll keep coming back if the content’s good and Metcalf’s Law starts to operate (the former seems a precondition of the latter). But I am getting sick of companies and publishers trying to “cash in” on blogs and Web 2.0. Smacks of desperation. (And I’m not counting Fast Company here, for the moment.) We already have distributed networks of like-minded readerships, organized by tags, searchable by Google, and aggregateable in our RSS readers.

For-profit aggregators of blogs and other content (like FastCompany an the new http://provideocoalition.com) really need to add value. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for value-adding for-profit aggregators: I consider the paper version of the International Herald Tribune one of them…)