What is Facebooks biggest tech problem right now?
 

Facebook CTO Bret Taylor on Facebooks biggest technology problem:

"Probably the biggest technology problem we have is delivering Facebook to all the people who use it, in the places they want to use it. The past couple of years has seen a rise in really advanced mobile devices.

The most symbolic of that is the iPhone, but now with the Android operating system we're seeing a huge amount of innovation in the mobile space, and more and more people are interacting with Facebook as much on their mobile devices as on their PCs and laptops.

As a consequence of that, if you'd asked a few years ago what's the right development platform for Facebook, it would have been easy, we would have said we'll make a website delivered via HTML, and that would be acceptable to anyone who wants to use Facebook.

With all these mobile devices, there's a huge amount of platform diversity now. When we update the Facebook product we have to update about seven different versions. We have to update the website that runs on your PC, the iPhone app, the Android app, the Blackberry app, the mobile site and a number of other device-specific versions of Facebook.

It's becoming a real engineering challenge for us, as well as other technology companies.

Because of that, I think we're spending a lot of our time investing in HTML 5. It's the code name, if you will, for the next generation of web technology that's optimised for mobile devices, and optimised to feel more like native applications.

The end goal is that we'll be able to develop one version of Facebook for mobile devices, that runs on all different kinds of mobile phones. That's really where our focus is now."


A great article, this bit I found to be very interesting and I am sure many here can relate no matter the size of your business... you can read it all here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12406171

i think their biggest problem is keeping their servers and DB in sync - which sometimes fails

What they SHOULD do is focus more on their API so that it's a single service that handles every aspect of Facebook...

Then focus on building out the website (utilizing the API), and crowd source everything else... Their iPhone app sucks IMO... haven't seen the Android one...

Either way there are thousands of developers out there capable of building better mobile apps who could make a $1 off every sale and deliver a better product because they would be a team specifically focused on that particular app as their entire model...

I guess that comes from having so many versions of a single product. Would be interesting to know how long they are away from the vision of a single version for all devices but I guess that will be for the board rooms eyes only!

Maybe the single version is like searching for the holy grail with the mobile device market moving so fast!

When you have grown so fast so quickly I guess even the simplest of things are not that easy to implement. I don't really use facebook but I have a few addicted friends that do. I don't think anyone can predict what would happen if the site was down for long periods of time as it has grown to be such a large part of peoples lives!

That's the exact reason why everything should be built on top of a RESTful API ;)

That way your API end points can all grow as needed, independently, and be a separate system... If you build you own site on top of the API then you know the API is functioning as intended as well and you learn its limitations and what direction it needs to grow at the same time :P

Plus there's the whole separate system portion talking about the code base where you can say... hey you know, this specific section does not scale well. Let's swap to C++ and NoSQL for this service... and you don't have to rework your entire code base... or in their case, 7 fucking code bases, hahahah.

I don't give a fuck about Facebook problems...

Amen bro!

I'm still on MySpace, what is this thing Facebook you are talking about.

read between the lines.... this could have been about any company as it address a big issue for many!

Hows your mobile strategy coming along ohh i forgot there is no money in mobile :1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh