The Facebook Blog

When we launched Facebook Video at the end of May, one of my favorite features was being able to record a video of myself within a message and then send it to my friends. Soon the Video team realized that we also sent friends messages in the form of Wall posts, so we started working on video attachments for the Wall too.

At the same time, we noticed other platform applications building their own walls - ways to leave various sorts of messages behind. We realized it made sense not just to add videos to Wall posts, but to make the Wall a more... central place that any platform application could add content to. As a result, we have now launched an improved Wall.

So now, the Wall isn't a place where you only write to your friends - if you want to record a video on someone's Wall, you can do that. If you want to draw on their Wall or post a song to their Wall, you can do that too - as long as there's an application built for it. It's another way for developers to make applications fit into Facebook and another way for you to share your favorite applications with your friends.

Kevin, an engineer at Facebook, is recording karaoke videos on his friends' Walls.

We asked ourselves this question more than once while working on improvements to search in March 2006. At the time, there were bigger search engines out there, including some good open source ones, that we could have used to power Facebook search results. However, we decided that searches carried out on Facebook had a particular structure that only we could understand and optimize for. We wrote a crawler for the site, created an in-memory reverse index using both hashes and ternary tries and created a ranking system that scaled to return... unique results for over 28 million user profiles.

Some quick stats about Facebook search: