[tenger]

You could put 1/1000th of the effort into finding a viable alternative to whatever it is that you dislike than it would take to actually reinvent the wheel that has been reinvented and copied hundreds if not thousands of times already, you’d probably find it.

Right, and that is an option too. I think that was in the original post, though I might have only thought it. That's why having a small team is much better than going it alone. Bounce ideas off of, etc.

[z3n]

I can tell you from experience that once you get over a certain traffic/load threshold, you need multiple dedicated servers... at the time I did it, it was several million hits per day. When that gets too big for it’s britches, you need to pay for mega-bandwidth and load balancing. And when that gets untenable, you need traffic distribution balanced to regional data centers so that the whole internet isn’t rushing billions of requests to a single data center.

... but then, I’m sure that would be a good problem to have.

I still say, even though facebook unseated myspace, I don’t think anything will unseat facebook until there is a paradigm shift in the technology sets (browser/app combo)