Blog Archive » The Non Personals. Q&A with Max Levchin: Slide more than a widget-maker. Slide.com claims to be the largest widget-maker in the world, reaching over 117 million unique viewers every month, according to Comscore. It lets people make slideshows of their photos and embed them in the form of “widgets” into Myspace and other social networks.
But widgets have been getting criticized lately for, among other issues, not having a clear business model. Slide also has some of the most popular applications on Facebook’s platform. Top Friends, a simple box in a user profile that shows, well, one’s top friends, has nearly 7 million users — the most of any Facebook application. Fortune Cookie, which provides users with fortunes about themselves, has nearly 4 million users. Facebook’s platform promises a more viral way for developers to gain large audiences of Facebook users quickly, by allowing them to build applications within Facebook, although lately there has been speculation that Facebook and its platform will not deliver the expected revenue and connections with users. Facebook engineering interview. Earlier today (or should I say yesterday) I attended Facebook’s Seattle Engineering Road Show which was a part technical talk and part recruiting event where Mike Shroepfer and a number of other Facebook engineers gave a fairly deep technical talk about the technologies used by Facebook.
Below are my notes on the presentation and ensuing Q&A session. One thing I found interesting about the talk was how similar their architecture for the platform that powers the Facebook news feed is to what my team has built for powering the Windows Live What's New feed. Before the presentation started there were a bunch of slides that carried some interesting and sometimes impressive stats about Facebook including Mike Shreopfer started his talk with a number of impressive statistics. Scaling Facebook has proven more challenging than scaling a traditional website. The most famous example of tackling this challenge is the Facebook news feed.
Now Playing: Yo Gotti - 5 Star (Remix) [feat. EarlyStageVC: More Than Who You Know, It's What You Know. Facebook Opens Its Pages As a Way to Fuel Growth. Top 10 Facebook Apps: Utility. Our list today will look at the top 10 apps for utility. These are apps that are in some way useful. This was a pretty broad list, and probably took us the longest to cut down to a top ten.
As a result, we were unfortunately forced to leave off a lot of good apps. This is a completely subjective list, so not everyone will agree with our picks and I encourage you to debate them in the comments. This post is the fourth in a 5-part series that will identify the top 50 Facebook apps (10 each in 5 categories).
Scrawl Pad Scrawl Pad adds an editable text box to your profile that any of your friends can edit. Mobile The official Mobile app from Facebook adds Facebook functionality to your mobile phone. HTML Box HTML Box is an app that lets you add pretty much anything to your Facebook profile. ChipIn ChipIn is how you raise money on Facebook. NewsCloud NewsCloud is a social news application for Facebook. My RSS my RSS is a simple RSS reader for Facebook. Files Carpool Price Tracker Cookbook Conclusion. Facebook's plan to hook up the world - May. 24, 2007.
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Imagine that when you shopped online for a digital camera, you could see whether anyone you knew already owned it and ask them what they thought. Imagine that when you searched for a concert ticket you could learn if friends were headed to the same show. Or that you knew which sites - or what news stories - people you trust found useful and which they disliked.
Or maybe you could find out where all your friends and relatives are, right now (at least those who want to be found). (This is an expanded version of a story in the June 11, 2007 issue of Fortune.) This isn't fantasy. In late May, the company's 23-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, got up in front of several hundred journalists, analysts, and industry leaders in San Francisco at an event the company called F8 (think of it as "fate") to say that Facebook would no longer be just another social-networking site.
Take those examples of community-empowered applications at the start of this story. Seth Goldstein » Blog Archive » web 3.0 = facebook 2.0? Google died on May 24, 2007. Not Google the company, nor the stock, but the idea of Google as this unstoppable juggernaut of world internet domination. Facebook opened up its platform to 3rd party developers- it moved from Facebook 1.0 to Facebook 2.0- and nothing has been quite the same since. I am not sure if it’s the applications themselves, or just the fact that we have something new to share with eachother, but without a doubt we (the blogosphere?)
Have all adopted a new interface which is capturing more and more of our attention. I like the way Pulver put it when he said that: In LinkedIn, everything centers around establishing a connection. I tend to agree with this. My friend Ted here in Mill Valley confided in me that “yeah, well I think I am now spending two hours a day on Facebook after having never used before a couple of months ago.” I no longer Twitter. Or Flickr so much. Or del.icio.us anymore. I still search with Google, and use it for email and docs and calendaring. Like this: A Day in the Life of Facebook Operations: Velocity 2010, Web Per. Facebook is now the #2 global website, responsible for billions of photos, conversations, and interactions between people all around the world running on top of tens of thousands of servers spread across multiple geographically-separated datacenters.
When problems arise in the infrastructure behind the scenes it directly impacts the ability of people to connect and share with those they care about around the World. Facebook’s Technical Operations team has to balance this need for constant availability with a fast-moving and experimental engineering culture. We release code every day. Additionally, we are supporting exponential user growth while still managing an exceptionally high radio of users per employee within engineering and operations.