Technology Review: How Facebook Works Facebook is a wonderful example of the network effect, in which the value of a network to a user is exponentially proportional to the number of other users that network has. Facebook’s power derives from what Jeff Rothschild, its vice president of technology, calls the “social graph”–the sum of the wildly various connections between the site’s users and their friends; between people and events; between events and photos; between photos and people; and between a huge number of discrete objects linked by metadata describing them and their connections. Facebook maintains data centers in Santa Clara, CA; San Francisco; and Northern Virginia. The centers are built on the backs of three tiers of x86 servers loaded up with open-source software, some that Facebook has created itself. Let’s look at the main facility, in Santa Clara, and then show how it interacts with its siblings. The bottom tier consists of eight-core Linux servers running MySQL, an open-source database server application.
Top 10 International Products of 2008 - ReadWriteWeb We live in a technologically rich and increasingly Web-savvy world. In this post, we celebrate the World Wide Web by selecting our top 10 international products of 2008. What do we mean by 'international'? We looked for products that were developed outside the U.S., which showed innovation and support for global Web standards. We also tried to choose from a cross-section of countries, although obviously we couldn't cover all the major countries. Of course with so many innovative products to choose from all around the globe, some exceptional non-U.S. products didn't make the cut. This is the second in our series of top products of 2008, the first can be found here: Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008 Note: the products listed below are in no particular order 1. Remember The Milk, the Australian startup that gave us our favorite task management tools, began when Omar Kilani, Emily Boyd and one stuffed monkey got together in 2004 with a simple idea. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
10 Top New Web Services of 2009 (From My Perspective) Last year, I highlighted ten top Web services that debuted in the year, from Socialmedian to BackType and Feedly. Not an all-encompassing list, blogging colleague Robert Scoble asked if "I was right", adding on a few of his own. With 2009 coming to a close, I thought it made sense to highlight some of my own personal favorites which are gaining traction. As with 2008, many services debuted in 2009 that were not stand-alone services, but instead, hooked into existing environments, like Twitter and Facebook, or the iPhone. 1) Pubsubhubbub 2009 was all about real-time and moving data more quickly from place to place. Pubsubhubbub, adopted by Blogger, FeedBurner, Cliqset, FriendFeed and many others, also spurred into action the launch of Dave Winer's RSSCloud, adopted by Wordpress for similar purposes. 2) Google Wave Google Wave made a huge splash in 2009. 3) Square Although extremely new, Jack Dorsey's follow-up to Twitter, Square, is very alluring. 4) Echo 5) my6sense 6) Brizzly 7) Lazyfeed