FastCompany.com turns on social network

Thanks for the heads up Robert. Love Fast Company, your videos and the new look of fastcompany.com.

Looks like Fast Company underestimated number of users... as fastcompany.com only shows:
"Unable to connect to database server"
"The MySQL error was: Too many connections."

:-)

Ouch, the site is down right now. They are working on getting it back up.

Shame that the database has crashed!

> Unable to connect to database server
>
> The MySQL error was: Too many connections.

And the config REALLY shouldn't tell us this!

> Currently, the username is dr30227 and the database server is 1.7.157.12.

it appears that FastCompany.com is down.

oops - the site appears to be down.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/4poiriers/2250761980/

Kindof ironic after you just complained about Yahoo's new video service eh? ;-)

1. The service doesn’t work. Says "Yahoo! Live is an experimental release. We’ve experienced heavy traffic and are taking a breather to tune things up a bit."

Hope it can be fixed soon. I can't even proceed to page 2 of Ed Sussman's article.

Not my lucky week. I went to Yahoo Live last night and couldn't get on, and now I can't get on Fast Company, either. I guess you are an "influential," - enough to crash servers.

fastcompany.com still down. BTW Robert, your sidebar still proclaims your employment at PodTech.

I have been meaning to ask - Can you do anything about partial feeds at FastCompany? Sure the content is pretty long in some cases, but even a longer summary might be a good idea. I am still subscribed for some reason, but I skip most of the posts because the first sentence does not match the title of the post and for some reason the first sentence of a lot of their articles are not interesting.
If they need money, put lots of ads in the feed. That is fine, but I need a little help getting started. Once I get into a FC article it is usually interesting and informative. I get smarter when I read FC, but they make it hard even for someone who values their content to get started reading.

Just got on the site and looked at it. It's really well-designed. I'm impressed with what Drupal can do, too.

We're back up! We'll be watching the site closely this morning, and hoping to iron out the performance issues some of you encountered.

@Luke -- we hear you. We'll be reevaluating our RSS feeds now that we're live on our new software platform.

Best,
Paul Maiorana
Director, Technology
FastCompany.com

Luke: I +hate+ partial text feeds and will fight to the death to get them to go full text. :-)

@15 might be a tough fight. For Joe Blogger full text is okay. For commercial sites partial feeds hope to suck the reader to the site in the hopes of sticking around. Whichever generates more money will win

Media is not social, people are.

Yikes! We had to restart a server. A flood of users. Sorry about that.

Christopher -- the Media has become the people. That's why the Media is social.

Will the videos you do stay within the same format as what you did at podtech? Or will you branch out to the wider breadth of topics and individuals that FastCompany addresses?

Scoble, its great you are working for FastCompany now, you are an asset hands down.

This new FastCompany approach is taking on to many challenges. The company needs to focus and streamline the experience look at sites like nobosh.com for example. Its news. Plain and simple,which is what's key.

@16 It might be a tough fight but it is for FC’s own good. As far as getting people to stick, you can put links in the body of the article and at the bottom that link to other FC articles.

Tony: I'm still playing with the format, but I imagine my videos will get outside the tech industry as I go out with journalists of the magazine. For the first month, though, I imagine you'll see a heavy tech bias, since that's where I have a lot of relationships.

I should say, though, that FastCompany.tv will be more than just me.

Sounds like an interesting experiment–and I’m joining, mainly because you're on it, Robert, and sound excited about it.

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 free.

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…)

They didn't take into account the fact that Drupal need LOTS of DB connections and CPU.

I had the same problem with my site.

First thing to do, use block cache
http://drupal.org/project/blockcache

Glad to see you at Fast Company. I fell in love with Fast Company when the other guys killed Business 2.0. Great content.

I didn't find you through search, but then when I browsed Social Responsibility, I saw you there and friended you.

@25. Ed from FastCompany.com here. We already have several hundred member blogs and we just opened for business on Friday. I think most people blog because they want to share ideas with interested people. FastCompany.com offers bloggers a great way to find an audience of readers who are very passionate about business, innovation and technology. We have about a million people a month who come through our site right now. We are featuring great member blogs on our homepage, including blogs in our search, tagging them up so they show up with our regular journalism. They also show up as options for our members to add to the feed reader we provide with every member homepage.

What's more, if you blog for us, you'll know a lot about the people who leave you comments and be able to continue a conve-- you are one click away from their member profile. Your blog is fully exportable as RSS, as is all other content you contribute to our site.

Current bloggers who don't want to set up shop somewhere else can still try to get their blogs listed as suggested RSS feeds for the members. We regularly recommend new feeds of interest to every member. Scobleizer.com, for instance, is a recommended feed.

If you want to see your blog featured as a feed, and you write primarily about business, innovation or technology, just e-mail lynne johnson, senior editor and community director of fastcompany.com at ljohnson@fastcompany.com.

Ed, the site looks great! Love the social web experience...

http://racetalk.wordpress.com/