{"id":137,"date":"2018-06-14T19:04:37","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T19:04:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/bus3060\/chapter\/ch08-2\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T18:44:37","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T18:44:37","slug":"ch08-2","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/bus3060\/chapter\/ch08-2\/","title":{"raw":"8.2 What\u2019s the Big Deal?","rendered":"8.2 What\u2019s the Big Deal?"},"content":{"raw":"
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Learning Objectives<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

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After studying this section you should be able to do the following:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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  1. Recognize that Facebook\u2019s power is allowing it to encroach on and envelop other Internet businesses.<\/li>\r\n \t
  2. Understand the concept of the \u201cdark Web\u201d and why some feel this may one day give Facebook a source of advantage vis-\u00e0-vis Google.<\/li>\r\n \t
  3. Understand the basics of Facebook\u2019s infrastructure, and the costs required to power the effort.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

    The prior era\u2019s Internet golden boy, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, has said that Facebook is \u201can amazing achievement one of the most significant milestones in the technology industry\u201d (Vogelstein, 2007). While still in his twenties, Andreessen founded Netscape, eventually selling it to AOL for over $4 billion. His second firm, Opsware, was sold to HP for $1.6 billion. He joined Facebook\u2019s Board of Directors within months of making this comment. Why is Facebook considered such a big deal?<\/p>\r\n

    First there\u2019s the growth: between December 2008 and 2009, Facebook was adding between six hundred thousand and a million users a day. It was as if every twenty-four hours, a group as big or bigger than the entire city of Boston filed into Facebook\u2019s servers to set up new accounts. Roughly half of Facebook users visit the site every single day, (Gage, 2009) with the majority spending fifty-five minutes or more getting their daily Facebook fix1<\/sup>. And it seems that Mom really is on Facebook (Dad, too); users thirty-five years and older account for more than half of Facebook\u2019s daily visitors and its fastest growing population (Hagel & Brown, 2008; Gage, 2009).<\/p>\r\n

    Then there\u2019s what these users are doing on the site: Facebook isn\u2019t just a collection of personal home pages and a place to declare your allegiance to your friends. The integrated set of Facebook services encroaches on a wide swath of established Internet businesses. Facebook has become the first-choice<\/em> messaging and chat service for this generation. E-mail is for your professors, but Facebook is for friends. In photos, Google, Yahoo! and MySpace all spent millions to acquire photo sharing tools (Picasa, Flickr, and Photobucket, respectively). But Facebook is now the biggest photo-sharing site on the Web, taking in some three billion photos each month1<\/sup>. And watch out, YouTube. Facebookers share eight million videos each month. YouTube will get you famous, but Facebook is a place most go to share clips you only want friends to see (Vogelstein, 2009).<\/p>\r\n

    Facebook is a kingmaker, opinion catalyst, and traffic driver. While in the prior decade news stories would carry a notice saying, \u201cCopyright, do not distribute without permission,\u201d major news outlets today, including the New York Times<\/em>, display Facebook icons alongside every copyrighted story, encouraging users to \u201cshare\u201d the content on their profile pages via Facebook\u2019s \u201cLike\u201d button, scattering it all over the Web. Like digital photos, video, and instant messaging, link sharing is Facebook\u2019s sharp elbow to the competition. Suddenly, Facebook gets space on a page alongside Digg.com and Del.icio.us, even though those guys showed up first.<\/p>\r\n

    Facebook Office? Facebook rolled out the document collaboration and sharing service Docs.com in partnership with Microsoft. Facebook is also hard at work on its own e-mail system (Blodget, 2010), music service (Kincaid, 2010), and payments mechanism (Maher, 2010). Look out, Gmail, Hotmail, Pandora, iTunes, PayPal, and Yahoo!\u2014you may all be in Facebook\u2019s path!<\/p>\r\n

    As for search, Facebook\u2019s got designs on that, too. Google and Bing index some Facebook content, but since much of Facebook is private, accessible only among friends, this represents a massive blind spot for Google search. Sites that can\u2019t be indexed by Google and other search engines are referred to as the dark Web<\/a><\/span>. While Facebook\u2019s partnership with Microsoft currently offers Web search results through Bing.com, Facebook has announced its intention to offer its own search engine with real-time access to up-to-the-minute results from status updates, links, and other information made available to you by your friends. If Facebook can tie together standard Internet search with its dark Web content, this just might be enough for some to break the Google habit.<\/p>\r\n

    And Facebook is political\u2014in big, regime-threatening ways. The site is considered such a powerful tool in the activist\u2019s toolbox that China, Iran, and Syria are among nations that have, at times, attempted to block Facebook access within their borders. Egyptians have used the site to protest for democracy. Saudi women have used it to lobby for driving privileges. ABC News cosponsored U.S. presidential debates with Facebook. And Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes was even recruited by the Obama campaign to create my.barackobama.com, a social media site considered vital in the 2008 U.S. presidential victory (Talbot, 2008; McGirt, 2009).<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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    So What\u2019s It Take to Run This Thing?<\/h4>\r\n

    The Facebook cloud<\/a><\/span> (the big group of connected servers that power the site) is scattered across multiple facilities, including server farms in San Francisco, Santa Clara, and northern Virginia (Zeichick, 2008). The innards that make up the bulk of the system aren\u2019t that different from what you\u2019d find on a high-end commodity workstation. Standard hard drives and eight core Intel processors\u2014just a whole lot of them lashed together through networking and software.<\/p>\r\n

    Much of what powers the site is open source software (OSS)<\/a><\/span>. A good portion of the code is in PHP (a scripting language particularly well-suited for Web site development), while the databases are in MySQL (a popular open source database). Facebook also developed Cassandra, a non-SQL database project for large-scale systems that the firm has since turned over to the open source Apache Software Foundation. The object cache that holds Facebook\u2019s frequently accessed objects is in chip-based RAM instead of on slower hard drives and is managed via an open source product called Memcache.<\/p>\r\n

    Other code components are written in a variety of languages, including C++, Java, Python, and Ruby, with access between these components managed by a code layer the firm calls Thrift (developed at Facebook, which was also turned over to the Apache Software Foundation). Facebook also developed its own media serving solution, called Haystack. Haystack coughs up photos 50 percent faster than more expensive, proprietary solutions, and since it\u2019s done in-house, it saves Facebook costs that other online outlets spend on third-party content delivery networks (CDN)<\/a><\/span> like Akamai. Facebook receives some fifty million requests per second (Gaudin, 2009), yet 95 percent of data queries can be served from a huge, distributed server cache that lives in over fifteen terabytes of RAM (objects like video and photos are stored on hard drives) (Zeichick, 2008).<\/p>\r\n

    Hot stuff (literally), but it\u2019s not enough. The firm raised several hundred million dollars more in the months following the fall 2007 Microsoft deal, focused largely on expanding the firm\u2019s server network to keep up with the crush of growth. The one hundred million dollars raised in May 2008 was \u201cused entirely for servers\u201d (Ante, 2008). Facebook will be buying them by the thousands for years to come. And it\u2019ll pay a pretty penny to keep things humming. Estimates suggest the firm spends $1 million a month on electricity, another half million a month on telecommunications bandwidth<\/a><\/span>, and at least fifteen million dollars a year in office and data center rental payments (Arrington, 2009).<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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    Key Takeaways<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

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