Agreed. I find it ironic since a piece like this is likely written at least partially in an effort to attract programmers to facebook. To me it reads: "Come w

Agreed. I find it ironic since a piece like this is likely written at least partially in an effort to attract programmers to facebook. To me it reads: "Come work for facebook and re-invent online chat. Again." Now, if the article had been about how they pushed the state of the art, I would be pretty interested, but none of this not new technology. As for the dark launch thing, it is a fancy trick, but there are ways of doing load testing in an automated system by having test servers simulate the load from real users. This usually can give you much better data without wasting bandwidth, slowing down users' experiences, etc.