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Facebook's additional growth due to Zynga was a epilogue after it's initial takeover of the space. Facebook had three big things: - It went live one campus at
by gfodor 15y ago
Facebook's additional growth due to Zynga was a epilogue after it's initial takeover of the space. Facebook had three big things:
- It went live one campus at a time. Each campus went from 0% to ~100% adoption in a viral explosion as the buzz spread around. They had enough features (photo tagging) to keep college students coming back.
- The News Feed had the 1-2 punch of being both a huge technical challenge (causing competitors to lag) as well as a game-changer for the stickiness of the site and the entire premise of why people go to social networking sites. It was like nuclear fuel for the two human traits that lead to using Facebook: voyeurism and narcissism.
- Facebook from the very beginning valued technical talent. When the News Feed was released it was clear they were going to be the winners of this contest since they were probably the only ones capable at the time of building it and knew enough to build it in the first place.
- IsaacL 15y agoI'm confused, what's the technical challenge of the News Feed? Scaling? Efficiently determining the most relevant news per user?
- yid 15y agoWhile the news feed is certainly not trivial, I think you have a point in that it wasn't news feed's technical prowess that made it a game changing feature for facebook. In fact, there was a pretty vocal displeasure among its user base about the news feed feature. In the end, however, (in a slightly biased reading) it fuels the fire of narcissism most efficiently, and therein lies its true power.
- pwaring 15y agoEfficiently determining the news feed per user is a pretty big technical challenge when you get to 500m users (which probably means a million or so news feed requests per second, possibly more). If you think about it, there are broadly two ways you can handle me posting an update which appears in my friends' news feeds: 1. Post an item which is has my user ID as the owner, and each time one of my friends reads their news feeds you join together all the news items based on a 'friend' relationship (presumably a many-to-many link), order them by timestamp and do all the filtering necessary where they've clicked "don't show this kind of update from this user". 2. Store a news feed per user and update all my friends' news feeds when I post something new, remembering to keep everything in sync should I delete the post, be removed as a friend etc.
- windsurfer 15y agoI believe the news feed was originally generated every 20 to 40 minutes for each user, regardless of whether they were on the site. This way, caching was extremely effective and the architechture could withstand downtime on the feed generators. I remember a few days where the news feed didn't update at all.