What kind of credentials do you need other than "large data centers" the scale of Facebook? IM doesn't count - so what does?

And PHP... infinite cred for scaling PHP.

What do you think is hard about that? PHP does everything you want for scalability, up until people force in second-system PHP frameworks that load and configure themselves on every new request.

Now, that old LAMP Apache+mpm_worker setup, that one was bad.

If they can get MySQL to scale in those data centers, I am sure they can attach a tv helmet to a large population. I still think Sony will come out on top though, they know this business better and have the battle scars with Microsoft.

Why does it matter, scaling realtime is just like any other programming related challenge. It doesn't take doctorate degrees, just a team of programmers who are willing to learn about the problem area.