Upload video. Aggregate and curate video from multiple sources. Mix your pro, user gen, and web gathered content with Magnify.net. Software Engineering is Social Engineering. A trip to Pittsburgh to visit old friends from WhizBang-Intelliseek-BuzzMetrics days, combined with a visit to Google's Pittsburgh office, coincident with the news that Live Labs was finally calling it quites led me to considering the nature of innovation and how to win in markets driven by technology.
Innovation, as I've mentioned before, is only partially about ideas - all the rest, the majority, is about execution. How to get the idea out to the customer. Intentional innovation requires the right people, but the execution requires the right process and the right environment. Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site. At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical.
The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that. Facebook’s scaling challenge Before we get into the details, here are a few factoids to give you an idea of the scaling challenge that Facebook has to deal with: