117 posts tagged “facebook”
2008
Mark Zuckerberg speaking at FOWA. The Future of Web Apps Expo is just a few weeks away, and Mark Zuckerberg is the surprise keynote. I’m chairing the developer track again this year.
Facebook engineering notes on Scaling Out. Jason Sobel explains a couple of tricks Facebook use to deal with consistency between their California and Virginia data centres. The first is to hijack the MySQL replication stream to include information about memcached records to invalidate; the second is to use Layer 7 load balancers which inspect a “last modification time” cookie and send users to the masters in California if they have updated their profile in the past 20 seconds.
Facebook Security Advice: Never Ever Enter Your Passwords On Another Site, Unless We Ask You To. Nice to see TechCrunch highlighting the hypocrisy of Facebook advising their users to never enter their Facebook credentials on another site, then asking them for their webmail provider password so they can scrape their address book.
simple-thrift-queue (via) Phillip Pearson’s surprisingly concise in-memory message queue written in Python using Facebook’s Thrift library (which is similar to Protocol Buffers, but was open sourced much earlier on). Handles 4,000 requests per second on a laptop.
Dark Launches, Gradual Ramps and Isolation: Testing the Scalability of New Features on your Web Site. Smart advice from Dare Obasanjo that extend the “dark launch” idea illustrated by Facebook chat a few weeks ago.
He/She/They: Grammar and Facebook. Facebook are going to start requiring gender information because foreign language translations wind up being too confusing when that information is not available. Aside: I wish they’d implement proper title elements on their blog posts.
Google Trends for Websites: myspace.com,facebook.com. New fun tool from Google Trends.
Facebook Open Platform. Facebook have open-sourced (under a modified MPL, does it still fit the OSI definition?) the code for the Facebook Platform, including their implementations of FBML, FQL and FBJS. This is no small release; the tarball weighs in at 40MB and includes libfbml, which depends on Firefox 2.0.0.4 for its HTML parser!
Engineering @ Facebook: Facebook Chat. The new Facebook Chat uses Comet (long polling with a hidden iframe) against a custom web / chat server written in Erlang, designed to handle a launch to all 70 million users at once. It was tested using a “dark launch” period where live pages simulated chat request traffic without showing any visible UI.
The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks. A bunch of smart questions posed by Facebook’s Dave Morin. This is why I think data portability is the wrong framing—moving data between sites is really hard. Importing social relationships between sites is much more viable (hence my interest in social network portability). Also, the complaints about systems sharing e-mail addresses are neatly addressed by using OpenID as the GUID for a user instead. OpenIDs can’t be spammed.
The GigaOM Interview: Mark Zuckerberg. Some interesting titbits on Facebook’s architecture.
For me, the big problem with Facebook is the plain fact that it's an extremely annoying piece of software. [...] The central issue for me is that Facebook suffers a severe reverse network effect: the more people who join, the less useful it becomes.
2007
Two-Faced Django. Excellent Django tutorial by Will Larson that shows how to build a polling application with an interface both on the Web and in Facebook. Also touches on unit testing and Ajax using jQuery.
Deconstructing Facebook Beacon JavaScript. How Facebook’s new Beacon service (also known as “Facebook ruined Christmas”) actually works.
Is Facebook Really Censoring Search When It Suits Them? Apparently MoveOn’s group “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!” stopped showing up in search results for “privacy”—the search claimed 17 results but suspiciously only showed 16.
New on Dopplr: The Past (with Pictures). Dopplr’s trip pages automatically display your Flickr/Facebook photos that were taken during the duration of the trip—simple and smart integration of third party sites.
identity-matcher. Dopplr’s social network importing code (for Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and sites supporting Microformats), implemented as a Rails ActiveRecord plugin.
Right now Facebook's position on 3rd party developers is amazing and I'm sure they are genuine in their support. However, give Facebook two missed quarters as a public company and they might not have no choice but to squeeze every ounce of revenue out of Facebook. That squeeze might include competing with the current crop of Facebook developers.
Announcing the Dopplr 100. Similar to how Facebook used to only allow college e-mail addresses, Dopplr is now open to holders of e-mail accounts from 100 large corporations. The blog release doesn’t specify if each corporation gets its own special “group” within the application; that would be a neat touch.
Facebook Bankruptcy. I have exactly the same problem.
Washington Post and Facebook. Deryck Hodge on hacking against Facebook API using Django.
iLike: Holy cow... 6mm users and growing 300k/day! (via) Facebook platform offers a viral distribution mechanism for free. Downside: you have to double your capacity every few days.
The Facebook Platform wiki (via) Not very well promoted yet.
Top XSS exploits by PageRank. Yahoo!, MSN, Google, YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook all feature.
... Facebook has roughly 200 dedicated memcached servers in its production environment, plus a small number of others for development and so on. A few of those 200 are hot spares. They are all 16GB 4-core AMD64 boxes, just because that's where the price/performance sweet spot is for us right now.
phpsh. An interactive shell for PHP, developed at Facebook and written mostly in Python. Facebook are really pushing their open-source stuff at the moment.
Facebook Query Language. The Facebook API now lets you run SQL-like queries. You can’t do joins but you can perform very simple subselects.