15,000 New Users this past Friday

When we first launched our MacOS dashboard XBOX Live Friends Widget in November 2007, we underestimated demand and quickly found our servers unable to deal with the surge in data requests. The site was saturated. Thousands of downloaded widgets were effectively creating a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against our own server. In short, we had to rewrite the widget and re-architect our server back-end. You can read a posting of the account here with all of the gory details.

Thanksgiving 2007 was a valuable experience that served us well with the wide-scale deployment of our iPhone/iPod Touch XBOX Live Friends List application.

With coverage on TUAW.com and Apple.com, we picked up over 15,000 new users on Friday alone. Between the MacOS dashboard widget and the iPhone/iPod Touch application, we're now serving up about 200,000 gamertags per day.

Thus far, the servers and code have held up with the increased demand. The community response has been great. I would like to thank everyone for the feedback and support. If you like our applications, please spread the word.

Thanks again!