Horoscope.com on Facebook

About Horoscope.com on Facebook

Horoscope.com is the world leader of Astrology on the Internet.

Their Facebook application has its own virtual currency and makes intense use of micro payments. The provider they've chosen is Offerpal.

This application also showcases many viral spreading techniques using all the tools provided by Facebook (Wall, Invitations, etc.), combined with a referal system that lets users earn points when they invite their friends.

Our Contribution

We implemented the entire front-end in CSharp and helped design the User Interface. Our responsibilities:

• Graphic Design
• Technical Design and Implementation
• Performance Tuning

Highlights

Coding for Performance

Because Horoscope.com is such a big website, every byte counts. Everything in their architecture is highly optimised, starting with the staff itself (just 10 developers for a website that make millions of visits each day).

The Horoscope.com Facebook application makes use of an SQL Server database, but this database is only hit when we really need to. To achieve this, we had to combine a small client-side Cookie cache along with Facebook XFBML features to avoid hitting the database on every page.

All calls to the Facebook Platform API are performed on the client-side, thus avoiding the penalty of server-to-server connections, a must when the other side of the wire would be Facebook (known to be slow on a regular basis).

The result is an application that can handle very high loads with very little machine power.