Facebook chat uses Erlang to scale

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

I started playing with Erlang last year. Mostly that meant reading the Joe Armstrong book, looking at ejabberd and writing a little code. Sadly, I've not had the chance to go much beyond the "playing" stage. Anyway, I've got a soft spot for functional languages like Erlang since my Programming ...

Towards the Web OS

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

Cesar Torres analyzed the new Facebook profile design yesterday as did TechCrunch. Both come to the same conclusion: Facebook is trying to become a web operating system. Both cite the use of a Mac OSX-style menu design (a weak indicator of an "OS" in my opinion) but Cesar goes farther ...

Serving the social graph and keeping the lights on: What Facebook and MySpace have in common with the power company

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Mashable has a post today discussing Facebook's 10% traffic decline from March to April as well as their year-on-year slowdown from 98% growth to 56% growth. This just adds to the recent meme of "Facebook kind of sucks" that has been going around for a while. For example RWW ...