As I said elsewhere, I’ve been reading (listening to) The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
This happened to me this week.
It seems that there’s some meme on Facebook called ‘Doppelgänger Week’. Everyone changes their avatar to a famous person they think they look like (or they’ve been told they look like).
Sounds harmless enough, right? Where’s the Black Swan there?
Let’s imagine your development department is the Facebook development department. You started this cool site in PHP in your college dorm, and it became big. Scratch that, it became huge.
So your poor developers have had to take your PHP code and make it scale to enourmous proportions. But we all know you can’t do everything at once. You pick something and you work on it.
Let’s think about that. Lots of people change their status every day up to every few hours. Hundreds of millions of changes to status. Facebook is (aparently) now the world’s largest storer of photos, so there’s millions of photo uploads. New people need a good experience, so we’d better make sure the signup procedure is nice and seamless. Where else do you spend your time?
On the avatar changing code? Probably not. You’ve run the site for years and you know that people only change their avatars on average (making this up!) every two months. So that’s not too many people at one time.
But then some one, some where, yells “Doppelgänger Week” and some how (read Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point
Suddenly, people need that avatar code to work. Sure, it might be about time for people to do an avatar change, but this single idea has suddenly sparked millions of avatar changes every hour. Don’t you wish you’d spent a bit more time on it?
OK, so Facebook was ready. Facebook didn’t come to a crash because of Doppelgänger Week.
But are you ready for your Doppelgänger Week? Unfortunately, by definition, Black Swans are unpredictable. You can plan for every guessable event. And someone, somewhere will stand up and shout “Doppelgänger Week!”
