This is excerpted from our about us page where we we explain a little about what we did before Liveflows and where we’re we want to go.
The start of a new idea
After Juniper Networks bought our last company [network switching / loadbalacing] in 2005, we turned our attention to that database layer. What would a really big database look like? Could you scale a db to web-size? If so, what could you do with it?
Personalization was always interesting to us, but what would web-scale personalization look like? What exactly would it do? How would it be deployed?
We read an NYT/ IHT article which talked about online news headlines, and how much editorial oversight was required to keep big stories around long enough to catch the infrequent users, but not so long that the site became boring to the super fans.
“Excuse me, but why can’t everyone just get the news they haven’t read yet? You know, the NEW stuff?
It was obvious this problem was begging for personalization, but wasn’t obvious to us how to tackle it.
In a not-so-clever move, we started building the core technology of how to do very flexible personalization before we had–ahem– an exact idea of what the front end of the app would be like. Oops. So it took us longer, but we’ve learned a lot and have had a good time along the way.
Now we hope that Liveflows will be the tool / application that lets everyone easily add personalization to their site.
GFS and Cassandra, Hadoop and Hbase are probably excellent at what they do. But ours is a completely independent approach that targets different workload.
We’ve traded batch processing strength for greater flexibility, event-driven processing and real-time results. But since our approach is new, (and very beta) we’re sure to experience some hiccups. Please bear with us when that happens.
What is Liveflows about?
The goal of Liveflows is to add value directly to websites, by providing a richer, easier experience for readers, through the use of advanced technologies not commonly found in publishing platforms. Users and publishers alike want more views, easier consumption, and more fun.
We have a long way to go, and a lot of ideas to explore. But it’s an exciting start, and with help from YOU, our beta testing users and beta testing publishers, we can continue to mature and enhance the product. So thank you.
Our small team is as distributed our database model, but we’d love to hear from you if you have any feedback, questions or ideas:
hello/at/liveflows/dot/com.