3 ms·
The early days of Facebook chat where god awful, with tons of missed messages and things not syncing within the web and 3rd party clients. AIM (and even Yahoo a
by djsumdog 7y ago
The early days of Facebook chat where god awful, with tons of missed messages and things not syncing within the web and 3rd party clients. AIM (and even Yahoo and MSN) were over a decade ahead of that garbage before FB eventually caught up with having a messaging system that didn't suck ass.
In fact most things Facebook did originally it did poorly: poor quality photo storage (Flickr offered high quality or even original quality for a fee), garbage messaging, etc. It eventually caught up after it got big, because everyone was already using it .. and all the other platforms lost market share or became niche.
- popz41 7y agoI believe messages were originally built on SMTP, then it moved to XMPP, then it all moved to MQTT
- benbristow 7y agoQuite an interesting thread posted last New Years here of how Facebook scale for demand at New Years Eve when everyone is sending Happy New Years messages at midnight https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780741
- peterwwillis 7y agoAll these systems stay proprietary, and then others can't build on top of their previous work. Seemingly any "science" which is designed to make money gets locked up in intellectual property or patents and the state of the art never progresses. We have probably re-invented the exact same systems over the last 30 years, poorly, because companies are too bass-ackward to share their engineering work.