Ensight - Jeremy Wright

Had the sudden realization today that I’d turned into one of those people I always hated. The kind that tells you you’ve made the wrong decision.

My core point of my rant was right. Any company which is a service needs to not only be designed to scale, coded to scale and ready to scale… They also need to scale when the time is right OR they need to stop new users from signing up so that current users aren’t affected.

But, the reality is that I shouldn’t have pointed at FeedLounge. After all, as Scott shows, they made conscious decisions about scaleability. And that’s about all anyone can ask.

It’s not like I’m even one of their users, who’s been put off by their choices. If I was I might have some reason to complain.

I have always, always, always felt that it was never fair for people outside a company to criticize the decisions made inside the company. I think it’s fair play when a company doesn’t make a decision, or is ignorant about something. But when a company is aware of something, makes a choices and sticks by it, it’s really hard to actually say it’s the wrong one when from the outside we dont’ know all the factors involved.

So while I stand by my point that Web 2.0 companies need to be architected from the ground up with scaleability in mind… I can respect it when a company makes a business choice to focus on the finish line first and foremost, knowing that there’ll be growing pains along the way.

Which, really, is what it sounds like FeedLounge has done. Which is good