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Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

I'm a back end developer and don't have much experience with web technologies, so may be some one can enlighten me.

Have we really come to a stage, where what Facebook has done after billions of worth investment and thousands of people working, can be cloned with a open source technology in hours?

>>I can make a clone of any complex app out there in the web in a matter of minutes/hours.

Again how is this possible. Or let me word it this way, if some thing can be copied in minutes how can it be called complex?

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Still didn't get my point did you?

I meant that you can get out an MVP of a complex web application like Facebook in a matter of hours/days (depending on the complexity of course) instead of having to wait for weeks/months when you're on with another framework.

>if some thing can be copied in minutes how can it be called complex?

Just because your life is made easier by a tool, doesn't necessarily mean the original process is any less complex. And that's why the market for for such tools even exist :)

Translation: Just because a bottle of Coca Cola costs $0.99 and a bottle of water costs $2, doesn't mean that the process of creating Coca cola is by any means less complex.

Cheers.

I guess what the parent poster means is that you can create the basic functionality of Facebook easily, i.e. something that looks and feels like Facebook and works reasonably well for a few users.

Whether it can support a billion users is a different story. (It won't)

Thank you. That's exactly what I meant.

I'm a beginner web developer and I can clone facebook in a few hours.

In its core, the app is just users who can friend each other.

Add AJAX to that... and tada, something that resembles facebook.

Scaling the app to be very reactive, available to millions accessing it at the same time, and with near 100% up time is where the hundreds millions of dollars go. (and all that data mining)

Brilliant :) For a moment I thought if I was actually the only one here who found the core of facebook so easy to clone :D. Thank you.

You underestimate how complex facebook is nowadays. Even the core is much more than just people friending each other.

If you mean "mimicking on or two of the features" I'm with you :)

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