Facebook is currently the top ranked Website in the world. Popularity of Facebook, in short FB, has made friends, students, officials, marketing managers, advertisers, turn towards Facebook to serve their individual purpose. In fact, Facebook has overtaken Google as the most popular Website recently, with a better page rank as well. It currently has over 350 million users across the Globe!
- What is Facebook?
Facebook is a social networking site through which members who has a profile on FB can link together and share information. Nowadays, FB is being used as educative, informative, advertising, marketing, networking, recreation, stay-in-contact, campaigning etc. I guess you know more about Facebook than me!! Let me go on.
- When and Why did the idea of FB arise?
In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, three Harvard University students, launched a Web site designed to put students in touch with one another, share their photos and meet new people. They called it thefacebook.com, and before long the site became extremely popular on the Harvard campus. A month after the site launched, the creators expanded it to include students from Stanford, Columbia and Yale. By 2005, students in 800 college networks across the United States could join the network, and its membership grew to more than 5 million active users. In August of that year, the site's name changed to Facebook.com
- How Facebook works?
Basically it has two ends: Front end and the back end.
Front end:
Facebook uses a variety of services, tools, and programming languages to make up its core infrastructure. At the front end, their servers run a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack with Memcache.
Facebook runs the Linux Operating system on HTTP Apache servers. It uses a huge MYSQL database to store all the information and PHP to design Web interface and their operations. And Memcache is a memory caching system that is used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites (like Facebook) by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce reading time. Memcache is Facebook’s primary form of caching and helps alleviate the database load. Having a caching system allows Facebook to be as fast as it is at recalling your data. If it doesn’t have to go to the database it will just fetch your data from the cache based on your user ID.
Back end:
Facebook’s back end services are written in a variety of different programming languages including C++, Java, Python, and Erlang.
A list of all of Facebook’s open source developments can be found here. Some of the major ones are Thrift(protocol), Scrib(log server), Cassandra(database), HipHop for PHP. Hiphop converts PHP to C++ program and Unix command 'g++' is used to compile the code.
If you look past all of the features and innovations the main idea behind Facebook is really very basic—keeping people connected. Facebook realizes the power of social networking and is constantly innovating to keep their service the best in the business.
I hope this article was informative! Comments welcome!
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