

Scaling Facebook to 500 Million Users and Beyond - yarapavan
http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scaling-facebook-to-500-million-users-and-beyond/409881258919

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KoZeN
I hate the fact that I am a regular user as the whole concept of the site
drives me insane. I recently executed a cull on my friends list and managed to
remove over 50% of my 'friends' but I'm still left with a list of over 100
people, the majority of whom believe the main purpose of the site is to
regurgitate other peoples status updates, take pointless quizzes and posting
the results on my wall (I don’t care if you would last 17.8 seconds in a fight
with a raptor).

I’ve been battling with the idea of simply deleting my profile and thus
freeing myself from this social millstone but that leaves me with two
problems:

1) I live in the UK and almost all my family & friends are based in Ireland
and Facebook is unequivocally the best medium for me to share photo’s of my 12
week old baby boy and keep them up to date with our progress in the UK.

2) If (when) I delete my profile it subsequently deletes all of the photo’s I
have uploaded which means my family will lose a huge amount of pics that they
have saved in their albums.

Now I am well aware that there are a multitude of platforms that will allow me
to share my family photo’s without being bombarded with pointless quizzes,
polls and religious/political flame wars but trying to convince my computer
illiterate family to adopt a new social platform would be akin to playing pool
with a rope.

I admit to feeling trapped by this social giant and I live in hope that within
the next few years a new platform will take the world by storm that will
enable me to keep in touch with my family without having to trawl through
pages of pointless content to find anything of remote interest.

/rant

