
Facebook isn't a technology company - funny Mark thinks it is! - sf2007

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pg
Any company that can deal with that kind of traffic has to be at least fairly
good at technology.

But I think he meant more than that. He meant they approach problems
(including nontechnical ones) the way technical people do. That's an
interesting idea. And it seems to be working, too.

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staunch
Funny you think that statement means anything useful.

Facebook certainly is _powered by_ technology and its future certainly relies
on innovating _using_ technology. Why don't you clarify what you mean in more
than a single sentence?

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sf2007
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.

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far33d
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.

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sf2007
How about JBOss?

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budu3
\- 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 MLÂand 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>

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Alex3917
I didn't see the speech, but my guess is that this has something to do with
invention verse innovation.

Invention means to create new technology. Innovation means to recombine old
technologies for a new purpose.

Technology companies invent. Technical companies innovate.

Advice: Don't be a technology company. Profits are a function of how much
people want your product, not how much you spend on R&D.; If you can make
something people want for zero R&D;, versus making something people want that
requires a huge investment, the intelligent choice should be obvious.

This is the premise of Seth Godin's book Free Prize Inside. That is, you could
spend 50 million dollars inventing a new cereal that will double sales if it
succeeds (but will most likely fail), or you could double sales just by
putting a free prize inside.

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JMiao
Just stop to think about how fast those photos load on Facebook, and you'll
know they're a tech-driven company.

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staunch
Serving massive quantities of static images is probably the easiest challenge
they've ( _uhh_ ) faced -- it's just expensive.

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fireandfury
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.

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far33d
By that measure, neither is google.

