The Facebook Blog

It's been a busy year here at Facebook. We've launched a lot of products, improved upon the existing site, and learned quite a bit in the process. In case you've lost track, here's the highlight reel from '06.

In January, we introduced Friend Details, which let you say how you knew your Facebook friends and build your Social Timeline. This was shortly before High School Facebook and College Facebook merged in February. By the end of February, we'd made search better by giving name, event, group, and profile matches to a word. We began March... with our inaugural NCAA Basketball Tournament Pool on Facebook. Also, we redesigned groups and events so people could post photos and write wall posts related to them.

In the spring, we expanded to include work networks, and allowed people to affiliate with multiple college and work networks. We also began offering Facebook Mobile Texts using an SMS-based service. The My Messages page was redesigned, and Browse launched so people could easily look at everyone around them (depending, of course, on privacy settings).

We had a number of upgrades for photos along the way, introducing Mobile Photo Uploads, a My Photos page upgrade, and a partnership with QOOP to power the Facebook Printshop.

During the summer, we added search functionality specifically for former classmates and coworkers. For the first time, Global Groups and Events became possible. We also launched the Facebook Development Platform, which allows developers everywhere to create applications that work with Facebook. Shortly after, we launched Facebook Notes, and with it, the Company Blog. As summer wound down, we launched a third mobile functionality, Mobile Web, and got everyone geared up for Election 2006 by creating Facebook profiles for all the candidates.

September got off to a rocky start when we introduced News Feed and Mini-Feed without the necessary privacy controls. We fixed that mistake within three days and went on to add more privacy controls for your search listing. We added extra spam prevention systems before we expanded in late September so that everyone could join Facebook.

We haven't slowed down since then. We launched Share, added more privacy controls for when you poke, message, and add people as friends. We added News Feed Preferences, introduced the Holiday Center, and released the Facebook Firefox toolbar as an open source project.

Even this week, despite a few desks emptying out for the holidays, we've launched a new poke confirmation box that doesn't require so many page loads per poke, and a new profile picture photo album that automatically keeps a history of your profile pictures.

Stay tuned for more great things in 2007. Happy Holidays from the entire Facebook Team.


Carolyn, Facebook's resident blogger, has resolved to poke less and message more in 2007.

Here's a secret: Mark Zuckerberg didn't write all of Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard. (Sorry, Mark, your secret is out.) He had a lot of help. No, I'm not talking about all the wonderful folks who work on the site every day. I'm talking about the unsung hero of many a young Web site: open-source and free software. Without it, there'd be no Facebook. We use it, we love it, we are committed to its principles, we even make some of it ourselves.

What's open source? Typically it means two things: the software is available free of charge, and... more importantly, so are the blueprints, or "source code." This means that anyone is free to make whatever changes they want to the software—maybe improving it or customizing it to make it better-suited to a particular purpose. If someone makes a useful change, they donate it back to the software project for everyone to use.

Here's how Facebook and open source go hand in hand:

Almost all our servers are running open-source software. Our Web servers use Linux and Apache and PHP. Our database servers run MySQL. We use memcached to help keep the site snappy. Some of our behind-the-scenes software is written in Python and Perl and Java, and we use gcc and Boost for the parts that aren't. Our developers use Subversion and git to keep track of their work. The list goes on—like many Web sites, we use it from top to bottom.

But we also make it a point to give back. Our highest-profile contribution to the open-source community is probably phpsh, an interactive PHP environment we use constantly when we work on the site. It was written in-house as a development tool and released to the world for anyone to use and improve. A close second to phpsh is our extensive contribution to the memcached code base; we've heavily modified it, more than doubling its performance and adding several important new features. Both of those are still actively being worked on here, and we will continue to release our updates to the world.

We contribute on a regular basis to the APC project, which just about every page on our site uses. We've contributed code to APD and Xdebug. Finally, we encourage developers everywhere to release code using the Facebook API as open source, and we've released some of our own such as the Facebook Firefox Toolbar.

Share and share alike and the whole world benefits. It was true in kindergarten, and it's still true on the Internet!



Steven, one of Facebook's infrastructure engineers, is probably making yet another change to memcached as you read this.