Facebook isn't a technology company - funny Mark thinks it is! • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook isn't a technology company - funny Mark thinks it is!

#11

Post by sf2007 » Mon, Mar 26, 2007, 6:28 PM UTC

far33d wrote: post #10

sf2007 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He referred to EBay as "not a technology" company, because they don't have many technical people in management. Just because Facebook has technical people in management, doesn't make it a "technology company" either. At least, not yet. Facebook is a great social networking site but certainy not a technology company. My examples of technology companies include Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun, BEA etc.

Funny. I wouldn't include any of those on my list of innovative companies. So maybe technology is just an irrelevant term anyway. Let's say "technically innovative" instead.

How about JBOss?

Re: Facebook isn't a technology company - funny Mark thinks it is!

#12

Post by fireandfury » Tue, Mar 27, 2007, 3:29 AM UTC

The definition of technology that I use is: a way to organize or process information.

So is Facebook a technology? Yes, I think so. It's a useful tool for promoting events and for keeping track of friends (contacts, what they are up to).

I agree that it isn't the most challenging or complex type of technology, but I've found some of the features (on Facebook) to be quite useful and entertaining.

Re: Facebook isn't a technology company - funny Mark thinks it is!

#13

Post by budu3 » Tue, Mar 27, 2007, 3:47 AM UTC

- We've built a lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC framework that allows us to seamlessly and easily tie together subsystems written in any language, running on any platform. Facebook is built in PHP, C++, Perl, Python, Java, and even a little bit of MLÂand it all works together.

- We are the largest user in the world of memcached, an open-source caching system. Originally developed by LiveJournal, we've since made so many scalability improvements and performance upgrades that we will be the primary contributor of features in the next major release.

- We've created a custom-built search engine serving millions of queries a day, completely distributed and entirely in-memory, with real-time updates.

http://www.facebook.com/jobs_engineering.php