Yeah, I know it’s Facebook and I had to unblock their domain to even read this, but this is interesting.
It’s really just an extension of a standard sort of design that I’ve been reading a lot about lately, but amped up to 11.
We were able to build our fabric using standard BGP4 as the only routing protocol. To keep things simple, we used only the minimum necessary protocol features.
It’s actually a really simple network design though I know it looks byzantine and complicated. It’s awesomely scalable; I’m impressed. I’ll likely never need something like that, or even to design something 1/100 that powerful, but it does give me some ideas that I can use in networks that I’ll likely build.
By all means build them, then. Hope the very concepts don’t turn out to be patented or something.
Do you think this is a sign that Facebook on a charm offensive or something?
These are just ideas I think, so can’t be patented. Though if Facebook sues me, I’ll blame someone else. 😉
Facebook has always been pretty good about releasing interesting design and other ideas out into the world. Not sure why, exactly, but I’ll take it.
Hahahaha! (emphasis mine)
Someone (at Facebook no less) has put into words much better than I can why I hate Facebook. I struggled with conveying my contempt in terms of open-source movement jargon like “deep linking,” and of course trying to explain the explanations. While every mass-audience website is a huge black box, Facebook is a huge informational black hole.
Put another way, Facebook isn’t really a web site. Socially, the role of Facebook today seems very similar to that of AOL back when it was the 800 lb. elephant among ISP’s, but was also “the ISP that isn’t really an ISP.” Back then, I learned the hard way not to share my email with people whose email addresses ended in
aol.com, as that is where the chain letters, stale jokes, and other “forwarding for its own sake.” Tragically, there is a large number of people who seem to think Facebook is the Internet.Indeed, for a lot of people, the only contact they now have with the internet is Facebook. FB is also going to move more forcefully into completely taking over email and website log-ins, and then attempt to get companies and people to transition those sites into Facebook itself.
I really don’t understand why most people accept this, but I did learn long ago that most people will take convenience despite any drawbacks of any sort, no matter how heinous or directly harmful.
I still don’t understand the deeper why, really, but that’s what seems to happen.