I’m not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I’m not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic.

Hell yeah, that’s good news! But don’t worry, you could only use it inside Facebook’s local network and it was limited to engineers. Anyway, pretty awseome?

This is not the only interesting story of what’s happening inside of Facebook. The Rumpus interviewed a Facebook employee, who — what else — wants to stay anonymous. Here are some key facts mentioned in the conversation, which I consider to be good to be aware of, when talking about THE social network:

• EVERYTHING is stored, protocolled and monitored.
• They run four data centers. In Santa Clara, San Francisco, New York and London. Each of them holds about five to eight thousand servers. They have essentially the same data on it.
• Current number of active users: 200 to 220 millions. All together (inactive, fake, etc.): over 300 million.
• There are 300 engineers working the site. One engineer for about 1 million users. According to founder Mark Zuckerberg this is the common ratio they want to keep.
• Facebook is the largest photo distributor in the world with storing more than a trillion images, each of them saved in six different versions.
• With the above mentioned Master Password, everyone who knew the password was able to administrate every single profile. But that’s not even necessary. As every social network or website, the data is also stored in a database.
• They created a Chief Privacy Officer position, which is currently held by Chris Kelly, running for Attorney General of California.
• To develope new features, they started running psychological analysis, such as eye-tracking to see where your eyes move while browsing Facebook.
• During the Iranian elections, Facebook coded a translated version in Farsi, their second right to left language ever, within 36 hours.
• One of the engineers is rewriting the complete software from PHP to HPPHP. Hyper-PHP is a compiled language (PHP is scripted) which will improve speed (about five times faster) and reduce the CPU load by 80%. This guy is currently inventing this language.
• 70% of Facebook engineers (you should better call them ultra-geeks) are from Harvard and Stanford.
• They don’t care what, where, how, when, you work, as long as you get your shit done. If you want to work at a bar, the ball game, a park, the roof, they don’t give a fuck. Just get your shit done.

It’s just amazing to get an inside view on how the largest social network worldwide operates. Here is the complete story at The Rumpus. By the way, don’t worry about your privacy. It doesn’t matter if it’s Google, Facebook, or your local ISP, the more you use the web, the more data you create. And the web never forgets.

© Habi for Pardon my french, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook

I wont post any screenshot, go find out yourself how it feels to sail on the facebook ship.

© Andi for Pardon my french, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: English, Facebook, Language, Pirates

With vanity URLs everybody can have an easy to remember adress linking to the facebook account.

Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you’ll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username/. You’ll also see a notice on your home page with instructions for obtaining your username at that time.

To find out more about this feature read the blog entry at the facebook blog.

(via)

© Andi for Pardon my french, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Vanity URLs