Companies invest in Facebook – either in terms of money (IPO anyone?), time, or resources. But what does Facebook invest in? With an 845 million user-base, how is this social networking upstart planning to compete with offerings from technology giants such as Google, Microsoft and Apple?
Facebook is perhaps the largest technology company that works completely on the web. It does not rely on a specific technology platform or hardware business. Listed below are some of the areas Facebook has invested, and will continue to invest heavily in the coming months…..
- Advancing HTML5 is particularly of interest to Facebook, as most of its users play Web based games
- The Facebook platform has helped companies grow by making use of its own set of APIs and infrastructure. This is definitely here to stay.
- Facebook Credits – A technology that supports virtual currency helped the company make $470 million last year.
- Facebook Apps – Facebook created its own value as a technology platform with third party app developers. These apps may turn out to increase user retention, especially as apps become more advanced and user friendly.
- Open Compute Project – Helps Facebook leverage community knowledge to improve its data center infrastructure.
- Hadoop – Open source framework for running distributed applications. Facebook has the largest Hadoop cluster pegged at 30 petabytes in March 2011.
- The LAMP Stack – Facebook was built using the LAMP stack to minimize costs along with a memory caching system called Memcached.
- Scuba – Helps in doing real-time adhoc analysis of arbitrary datasets such as MySQL databases.
- HipHop for PHP – Helps Facebook in reducing 50% less CPU usage required by its code, thus helping its API infrastructure serve twice as much traffic with one third lesser CPU usage.
- Scribe and Thrift – Are open source frameworks that are used to collect log data of billions of system messages using a whole bunch of different modules written in Java, Python, PHP or C++ code
- Phabricator – Is a suite of web applications that helps users manage workflows for creating and managing software projects.
What new technology are you planning to invest in this year to help compete better? To increase brand awareness? Or to get to market faster?