Jai Ho ! FaceBook ...

The one thing which doesn't cease to amaze me is the ever growing popularity of Facebook. My first interaction with FB started in 2007 when my boss asked me to investigate social media and this was just taking off. Although I created accounts I found this was not my cup of tea and soon lost interest..

Suddenly this I year I observed amazing levels of FB  activity. Practically everyone I knew in and out of office is on FB and most of them are using FB applications i.e. Farmville, Fishville etc. Their competitors like MySpace and Orkut Friendster have been left far behind and recent statistics say that their nearest rival Twitter manages less users than the Facebook application Farmville :)

Also it  is said in the same report that the fastest growing demographic is the 35+ age group!! So FB has gone way beyond being a youth or a student oriented social networking site. In India it is very quickly catching up with Orkut

Some people attribute this to the fact that their erstwhile competitor and former number one MySpace was besieged with a lot of spam and received bad press  due to which people moved away from MySpace and the only one around to latch onto was Facebook, as it provided the complete package messages, pictures updates, videos, fan pages etc.etc.

Recently I read that FB  has re-written the PHP runtime becoz it is too slow for them.. With 400 Million+ users and growing probably they need to keep re-inventing. And their growth numbers are also amazing. They were only around 100 Million in 2008 . They also became cashflow positive although they are still funded by VC's..

As techies the one thing which must be puzzling most of us is how they manage such large volume data which is constantly increasing as well. Some statistics say that they have more than 30,000 servers. This data is a bit dated and these numbers were given by Jeff Rothschild Vice President of Techlogy FB in October. Their entire application is supposed to be developed in Linux / Apache / PHP / MySQL.  FB has also developed Cassandra a database system for storing very large volume data,  which is open sourced now.

Of course the skeptics will say that soon a next new thing will come and the FB wave will die down.. But till then 'Jai Ho' FB.. :)

BTW I don't think you can't count Twitter or Linkedin in the same category  as they serve a different purpose.

Pls. dont bombard me with comments about Google's data or servers, FB and Google are not in the same league yet :)