497 karma · joined September 3, 2008
The main issue was that at this point in time, we were relying on people’s Unix names to directly to setup the person’s dev box. Obviously, <unixname>.dev.facebook.com with the unixname of www was going to lead to issues. It just broke things internally and was fixed pretty quickly.
Medium to large companies, they need some sort of calendaring and meeting room booking system. This is where outlook (more importantly exchange) comes into the picture. I don't think it's the best solution out there, but it's a solution that works reasonably well.
I also don't really like that email and calendaring are tied together, I'd love to see a robust solution that works across Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Yishan Wong wrote about this a few years ago.[1]
So, this would work great for personal email and small companies, but I don't see it replacing the email client of the larger ones. I'd love to see gmail and microsoft give some of these search/indexing features.
[1] http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/great-unsolved-problems-in-com...
I don't work on the team anymore, but I can probably start off a thread with the right people involved from Facebook's side.
Here is a post that Jay Parikh (VP of Infrastructure) made about it. http://tinyurl.com/cnvss4v
Our density isn't as high (we have 64 minis) because of cooling and cabling that we designed according to our datacenter cooling standards.
@jurre - If you want to chat about our design, message me and I can put you in touch with our hardware designer.
We ended up with a torrent deployment system that scales beautifully.
So, if you don't do the second part, you should be fine?
Also, I personally would be careful in installing apps. This goes for any application (not just facebook). If you trust an app, go ahead, if not, just avoid it. This is going to be different for different people.
Edit: Ok, I think I see your point. You don't want an app to ask for too many permissions right off the bat and then you having to go back and remove them.
Again, I think this is going to be developer and users driven. The more people ask for apps to start off with minimal permissions the developers will have to comply. Does that make sense?
The second part of the application is the social part. Again, if you don't trust an application you can always go to your app settings page on facebook (https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=applications), select the application you are worried about and deny specific items that you don't want the app to have access to.
If you "x" out too many things, you might cripple the application, but that's the way it works.
For starters, it's true that a visit to a news story or watching a video will trigger a feed story. The point that most people seem to be missing is that this requires you to knowingly allow a social application. For example, in my case, I installed the social plugin for rdio (rdio.com). When I listen to a song on rdio, it publishes it to my friends ticker feeds. (Ticker is the bar on the side where likes, listens, reads, etc go). There are a couple websites that are doing read social browsing, for example the Washington Post's social reader (https://apps.facebook.com/wpsocialreader/). Again, just by visiting this page you will not trigger anything unless you have already allowed the application access.
In the past I've setup my music player on the laptop to publish the songs I'd been listening to, to my IM client (as away messages) - Adium let's me do this out of the box. It's kind of the same idea, instead this is just built in to the website you visit or music you listen to.
You can also disable any application you previously installed by going to Privacy Settings and clicking on Apps and Websites. It should all be there. You don't have to log out of facebook or close your account. Just delete all your social apps. (https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy)