Let’s Come

INSIDE FACEBOOK

The Beginning

• Oct. 28, 2003: Mark Zuckerberg hacked into restricted areas of Harvard University's computer network to create Facemash.

• January 2004: Zuckerberg began to write the basic software to create a universal Harvard social directory, TheFacebook.

• Jan. 11, 2004: Zuckerberg registered thefacebook.com domain.

• Feb. 4,2004: TheFacebook launched at Harvard University.

EXPANSION

• March 2004: Initially restricted to Harvard students, The Facebook expanded to other colleges, including Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Columbia University and Yale University.

The First Investor

• June 2004: The Facebook moved it's headquarters to Palo Alto, Calif., and received an investment of $500,000 from Peter Thiel.

• June 2004: The facebook incorporated into a new company, and Sean Parker, a co-founder of Napster, took the job of president for the growing business.

• September 2004: Facebook replaced its "User is..." prompt with a "What's on your mind?" question in the newly designed space for posting and sharing status updates called "The Wall."

• Aug. 23, 2005: The Facebook dropped its "The" and became Facebook. Purchase price it paid for the Facebook.com domain name: $200,000.

• September 2005: Facebook added networks for high school students. In December 2005, Facebook reached 6 million users.

• October 2005: Artist David Choe began painting murals at the headquarters of Facebook in exchange for company stock. Today, the shares he received are worth an estimated $200 million.

Finally opened for all

• Sept. 26, 2006: Facebook removed its restrictions and allowed anyone 13 and older with a valid email address to join. A news feed and a mini-feed were introduced, providing easier ways to see what your friends are up to.

Started Entertainment

• May 2007: Facebook Platform launched with 65 developers and more than 85 applications. Third-party developers quickly followed, building applications to integrate with Facebook. Games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars spread rapidly.

The Front End

How does Facebook work?

• Facebook uses a variety of services, tools, and programming languages to make up its core infr. At the front end, their servers run a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack with Memcache. A structure

• MySQL

• For the database, Facebook utilizes MySQL because of its speed and reliability. MySQL is used primarily as a key-value store as data is randomly distributed amongst a large set of logical instances. These logical instances are spread out across physical nodes and load balancing is done at the physical node level.

• PHP

• Facebook uses PHP because it is a good web programming language with extensive support and an active developer community and it is good for rapid iteration. PHP is a dynamically typed/interpreted scripting language

The Back End

• How Does Facebook Work?

• Facebook’s backend services are written in a variety of different programming languages including C++, Java, Python, and Erlang. Their philosophy for the creation of services is as follows:

• 1. Create a service if needed• 2. Create a framework/toolset for easier creation of

services• 3. Use the right programming language for the task

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