Re:All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad
by joe_the_user on Sunday June 12, 2011 @05:14PM
(#2647413)
Actually,
As far as I can tell, what is really useful and really hard about maintaining and extending Facebook is that Facebook presents all the facilities of the Internet without the factors which tend to make these facilities feel "stale" in their 'native' form.
Facebook presents the equivalent of blogs, websites and emails in an appropriately filtered form. Their job is the job of a good host at a good party - keeping the conversation going without being visible oneself. And thus Facebook keeping its algorithms current is a very hard but fairly invisible job (the visible stuff is so simple a competent php programmer could do it in a month).
As far as I can tell, what is really useful and really hard about maintaining and extending Facebook is that Facebook presents all the facilities of the Internet without the factors which tend to make these facilities feel "stale" in their 'native' form.
Facebook presents the equivalent of blogs, websites and emails in an appropriately filtered form. Their job is the job of a good host at a good party - keeping the conversation going without being visible oneself. And thus Facebook keeping its algorithms current is a very hard but fairly invisible job (the visible stuff is so simple a competent php programmer could do it in a month).