The attitude of companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter is: if the product isn't addictive or useful to Billions of people, its not worth doing.

Hence there are vastly more resources dedicated to assimilating eg photos and games into their ecosystem, than into something computationally innovative.

This is IMHO a huge mistake, since they could instead be introducing simple forms of programming that takes you on a continuous curve from using the product, to developing for it. There is a huge hunger in the masses for better forms of programming.

This point will probably become obvious if the Wolfram Language is successful.

I'm sure Facebook's Data Science team does a lot of interesting things internally. They do in fact have some interesting papers [0] and [1], though obviously with more of an 'academic' feel than the blog post.

[0]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4503

[1]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.4145 (edit)

Edit: they also have this FB page which has a steady stream of interesting stuff: https://www.facebook.com/data

Thank you so much. Edit: I don't work at facebook.

Are you on the Facebook datascience team? Your profile is pretty sparse.

Imagine how much more of this could be done if they did open their data.

Data is their biggest asset, they wouldn't want to just shar it freely.