Lets Come

INSIDE FACEBOOK

 Oct. 28, 2003: Mark Zuckerberg hacked into restricted areas of Harvard University's computer network to create Facemash.

 January 2004: Zuckerberg began to write the basic software to create a universal Harvard social directory, TheFacebook.
Jan. 11, 2004: Zuckerberg registered thefacebook.com domain. Feb. 4,2004: TheFacebook launched at Harvard University.

EXPANSION
March 2004: Initially restricted to Harvard students, The Facebook expanded to other colleges, including Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Columbia University and Yale University.

The First Investor

June 2004: The Facebook moved it's headquarters to Palo Alto, Calif., and received an investment of $500,000 from Peter Thiel.

 June 2004: The facebook incorporated into a new company, and Sean Parker, a co-founder of Napster, took the job of president for the growing business.

 September 2004: Facebook replaced its "User is..." prompt with a "What's on your mind?" question in the newly designed space for posting and sharing status updates called "The Wall."

 Aug. 23, 2005: The Facebook dropped its "The" and became Facebook. Purchase price it paid for the Facebook.com domain name: $200,000.

September 2005: Facebook added networks for high school students. In December 2005, Facebook reached 6 million users.

 October 2005: Artist David Choe began painting murals at the headquarters of Facebook in exchange for company stock. Today, the shares he received are worth an estimated $200 million.

Finally opened for all

Sept. 26, 2006: Facebook removed its restrictions and allowed anyone 13 and older with a valid email address to join. A news feed and a mini-feed were introduced, providing easier ways to see what your friends are up to.

Started Entertainment
May 2007: Facebook Platform launched with 65 developers and more than 85 applications. Third-party developers quickly followed, building applications to integrate with Facebook. Games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars spread rapidly.

The Front End

How does Facebook work?
Facebook uses a variety of services, tools, and programming languages to make up its core infr. At the front end, their servers run a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack with Memcache. A structure

 MySQL
For the database, Facebook utilizes MySQL because of its speed and reliability. MySQL is used primarily as a key-value store as data is randomly distributed amongst a large set of logical instances. These logical instances are spread out across physical nodes and load balancing is done at the physical node level.

 PHP

Facebook uses PHP because it is a good web programming language with extensive support and an active developer community and it is good for rapid iteration. PHP is a dynamically typed/interpreted scripting language

The Back End

How Does Facebook Work? Facebooks backend services are written in a variety of different programming languages including C++, Java, Python, and Erlang. Their philosophy for the creation of services is as follows: 1. Create a service if needed 2. Create a framework/toolset for easier creation of services 3. Use the right programming language for the task