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What I do not understand, is why Facebook is called a "technology company". It's no more of a technology company than News Corp or any other media company. The

by cft 14y ago

What I do not understand, is why Facebook is called a "technology company". It's no more of a technology company than News Corp or any other media company. The technology there is rather simple, compared to biotech or SpaceX. I would classify it as media/entertainment (which harkens back to Zukerberg Productions) as it used to say at the bottom of FB a few years ago.

dasil003 14y ago
I take it you're a web developer of some sort, so web technology seems trivial. But building, evolving and operating a site like Facebook is an incredible technical challenge. Sure it's not biotech or space tech which require hard science, and sure the penalties for failure are not as high, but the infrastructure they're building is world class tech. Running a newspaper site at the same scale would be orders of magnitude easier because it's much more trivially cacheable, and I say "would be" because there is no newspaper site that operates at that scale. Also, speaking of News Corp, let me point out that a big part of how Facebook killed MySpace was MySpace was not able to come anywhere near the performance, or pace of evolution of Facebook. It's also worth noting that the previous market leader, Friendster, failed because they couldn't fix their performance problems when they were a tiny fraction of the size Facebook is now. There's no need to mince words: Facebook is slinging serious scalability sauce that could only be developed by a leading technology company.
DanielRibeiro 14y ago
It is because software is eating the world. Marc Andreessen (who actually sits on FB board) explained this recently[1]. Another way of seeing this, is through how much engineering goes on their scaling problems. [1] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22660214207/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-10-notes-essay http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22660214207/peter-thiels...

by cft 14y ago

dasil003 14y ago

I take it you're a web developer of some sort, so web technology seems trivial. But building, evolving and operating a site like Facebook is an incredible technical challenge. Sure it's not biotech or space tech which require hard science, and sure the penalties for failure are not as high, but the infrastructure they're building is world class tech. Running a newspaper site at the same scale would be orders of magnitude easier because it's much more trivially cacheable, and I say "would be" because there is no newspaper site that operates at that scale. Also, speaking of News Corp, let me point out that a big part of how Facebook killed MySpace was MySpace was not able to come anywhere near the performance, or pace of evolution of Facebook. It's also worth noting that the previous market leader, Friendster, failed because they couldn't fix their performance problems when they were a tiny fraction of the size Facebook is now. There's no need to mince words: Facebook is slinging serious scalability sauce that could only be developed by a leading technology company.

DanielRibeiro 14y ago

It is because software is eating the world. Marc Andreessen (who actually sits on FB board) explained this recently[1]. Another way of seeing this, is through how much engineering goes on their scaling problems. [1] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22660214207/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-10-notes-essay http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22660214207/peter-thiels...