"Web scale" refers to dealing with the problems and issues that occur when you have hundreds of millions of global users. This includes performance and availability, but also security issues, social/cultural issues, and business/tax/legal issues. (Not that "web scale" is in Websters -- just google around and look at the other uses)
The naming problem is no greater proportionally 'at web scale' than it is at lower numbers of users. Used in this context, it's a cringeworthy bit of chin-stroking jargon.
At global scale would be a more sensible. 'At web scale' doesn't mean, 'With users from outside the US'.
re: proportions: If Google+ was only for Chinese plumbers, the percentage of "problem" names (and the kinds of problems those names posed to the G+ DB schema) would obviously be different -- hence the usefulness of the term "web scale" when talking about this sort of problem.
re: "web scale" not implying/talking about global users... Do you know of anyone operating a web scale business that doesn't have global users? Even sites that are supposedly for US customers only (netflix, etc -- caused by regional licensing), still have non-US customers using proxies to bypass their geo filter...
Hmm, actually global scale is wrong too - I retract that :) The problem arises regardless of 'scale' (number of users).
To reiterate: the number of users (scale) is irrelevant to the issue of problem names.
I can see why someone sprinkled buzzwords on the HN title that didn't exist anywhere in the article, and weren't applicable though. Makes the issue sound more 'techie'.
I wrote that article, and consider the title I assigned to it here on Hacker News to be its official title; this is also the title that I used when I linked to it on my Facebook Page. Why, therefore, it matters at all that these words "didn't exist anywhere in the article" is beyond me.
As for "buzzwords", if you deal at all with Google employees, this becomes an irritating mantra: systems that have less than a hundred million users are often considered "toys" (and, to be clear, I can totally understand why this would be this way to these people).
And yes: I think that the point that "this actually happens to everyone everywhere" is an interesting point, and was the first comment on this post by patio11. I found that a very interesting insight, as many of my examples are more "those cases that come up when dealing with a global user community full of interesting edge cases", which to me /defines/ "web scale".
With the benefit of time and reflection, I now think that the term web scale is fine in this context and I was just being a curmudgeon. For what it's worth, which admittedly isn't much!
