The Next 6 Months Worth Of Features Are In Facebook’s Code Right Now | Hacker News Reader

The Next 6 Months Worth Of Features Are In Facebook’s Code Right Now

techcrunch.com

36 pointssrikar9 comments

This mostly seems to be a bitter rant about the time Facebook tricked TechCrunch by rolling out a new feature that only TechCrunch staff could see.

See the results of the prank here: http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/10/facebook-now-lets-you-fax-y...

Uh, yeah. Is it really that unimaginable that they want to A/B test (or beta test) the features before they roll them out to everyone?

And keeping the media away the new features is just common sense. They're going to publish a huge story about a new change... Once that isn't complete and isn't ready for everyone. That just can't end well.

Being able to turn on and off features based on login or randomness seems like a pretty common feature when you get big enough for it to be meaningful to do tests on portions of your userbase, or have multiple tests running at once.

Disqus have open-sourced a similar system for Django-based sites, Gargoyle: http://code.disqus.com/code/projects/gargoyle.html

You basically stick if(abc-is-active)s throughout your code, and then it has a fancy frontend for defining when abc should be active, based on user, ip, randomness, etc. They showed it off in their PyCon 2011 presentation, at about the 10:00 mark: http://python.mirocommunity.org/video/4256/pycon-2011-disqus...

Big whoop. All the websites that deal with similar scale have a six-month (or longer) pipeline, and almost all of them test code "live" in one way or another.

Which means Facebook is not pressed by competitors as of now. They hold onto a bunch of cool features ready to swith on, just in case competition strike. Any competitor will face doubly uphill battle -- both against the network effect and against a fresh reserve of new features, enabled as soon as the Facebook notices them.

My take-away from the story -- little competition results in slow progress.

Oftentimes, these features are in "reserve" because they're conducting experiments to measure the effect on user behavior, or because various parts of the fit & finish aren't done yet, or because there're still serious open questions about certain edge cases. It's usually not the case that they're waiting for the competition to press them; at that point, you just risk losing your reputation as an innovator.

The first prototypes of Google Instant were done in 2000 or 2002, I think, and Yahoo had a demo ready in 2006. Yet it wasn't until 2010 that a production implementation could actually launch. You could argue that the code existed back then, but there were a bunch of blockers in capacity, user experience, and user experience that prevented it from being a launchable feature.

I believe that Google uses a similar development methodology with Chrome to separate the channels out. Everyone works on the Chromium trunk, and features are enabled/disabled depending on which channel they are appropriate for. Single trunk development makes a lot of sense when you make a product which doesn't rely on distinct version releases.

I can't help but ask "so what?" I know the media likes to fascinate themselves with facebook, but adding websites does not really make the bog standard concept of not-yet-released products news.

After wondering why they're reporting on this, I assumed that they might be drawing some conclusions or commenting on what this actually means. They have 6 months of code in the pipe, are they still testing? can't handle the volume of change? think their users can't handle the volume of changes? or just are happy enough in the market that they're comfortable sitting on a few things that are ready to go live? Anything?

Nope. The story came across with the voice of a schoolgirl giggling "he he he, facebook mentioned us." With trite reporting like this, who can be surprised they've implemented the level of control to blind techcrunch at will?

I can't see the news-worthyness of this either. Facebook has 6 months of stuff in the pipe, but hasn't been deployed to the general public.

Is this important? It's impossible to tell. It all depends on how they quality control and implement changes. Facebook is very interconnected and giving it a third leg might cause a complication in how it runs. How it appears, given that my wife's facebook can be on a server down for maintenance and my account works perfectly fine, is that it might be in the facebook backend, but it could be taking them months to safely roll it out without downing their entire network.

Furthermore, who knows what will get released. I could have 3 blog posts in the works, but I might drop one or two if it becomes irrelevant before posting. I don't get why facebook is seemingly not allowed this courtesy, maybe it isn't in Facebook's best interest to create a segregated network when whites/blacks men/women dogs/cats can't access each others profiles or send messages to each other. However, it might have a good idea, IE the ability to block people who are harassing or spamming you.

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