
The Next 6 Months Worth Of Features Are In Facebook’s Code Right Now - srikar
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/30/facebook-source-code/
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akent
This mostly seems to be a bitter rant about the time Facebook tricked
TechCrunch by rolling out a new feature that only TechCrunch staff could see.

See the results of the prank here: [http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/10/facebook-
now-lets-you-fax-y...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/10/facebook-now-lets-you-
fax-your-photos-i-have-no-idea-why-anyone-would-want-to-do-this/)

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wccrawford
Uh, yeah. Is it really that unimaginable that they want to A/B test (or beta
test) the features before they roll them out to everyone?

And keeping the media away the new features is just common sense. They're
going to publish a huge story about a new change... Once that isn't complete
and isn't ready for everyone. That just can't end well.

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jack12
Being able to turn on and off features based on login or randomness seems like
a pretty common feature when you get big enough for it to be meaningful to do
tests on portions of your userbase, or have multiple tests running at once.

Disqus have open-sourced a similar system for Django-based sites, Gargoyle:
<http://code.disqus.com/code/projects/gargoyle.html>

You basically stick if(abc-is-active)s throughout your code, and then it has a
fancy frontend for defining when abc should be active, based on user, ip,
randomness, etc. They showed it off in their PyCon 2011 presentation, at about
the 10:00 mark:
[http://python.mirocommunity.org/video/4256/pycon-2011-disqus...](http://python.mirocommunity.org/video/4256/pycon-2011-disqus-
serving-400-)

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neilk
Big whoop. All the websites that deal with similar scale have a six-month (or
longer) pipeline, and almost all of them test code "live" in one way or
another.

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dexen
Which means Facebook is not pressed by competitors as of now. They hold onto a
bunch of cool features ready to swith on, just in case competition strike. Any
competitor will face doubly uphill battle -- both against the network effect
and against a fresh reserve of new features, enabled as soon as the Facebook
notices them.

My take-away from the story -- little competition results in slow progress.

~~~
nostrademons
Oftentimes, these features are in "reserve" because they're conducting
experiments to measure the effect on user behavior, or because various parts
of the fit & finish aren't done yet, or because there're still serious open
questions about certain edge cases. It's usually not the case that they're
waiting for the competition to press them; at that point, you just risk losing
your reputation as an innovator.

The first prototypes of Google Instant were done in 2000 or 2002, I think, and
Yahoo had a demo ready in 2006. Yet it wasn't until 2010 that a production
implementation could actually launch. You could argue that the code existed
back then, but there were a bunch of blockers in capacity, user experience,
and user experience that prevented it from being a launchable feature.

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ryanlchan
I believe that Google uses a similar development methodology with Chrome to
separate the channels out. Everyone works on the Chromium trunk, and features
are enabled/disabled depending on which channel they are appropriate for.
Single trunk development makes a lot of sense when you make a product which
doesn't rely on distinct version releases.

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bxr
I can't help but ask "so what?" I know the media likes to fascinate themselves
with facebook, but adding websites does not really make the bog standard
concept of not-yet-released products news.

After wondering why they're reporting on this, I assumed that they might be
drawing some conclusions or commenting on what this actually means. They have
6 months of code in the pipe, are they still testing? can't handle the volume
of change? think their users can't handle the volume of changes? or just are
happy enough in the market that they're comfortable sitting on a few things
that are ready to go live? Anything?

Nope. The story came across with the voice of a schoolgirl giggling "he he he,
facebook mentioned us." With trite reporting like this, who can be surprised
they've implemented the level of control to blind techcrunch at will?

~~~
electromagnetic
I can't see the news-worthyness of this either. Facebook has 6 months of stuff
in the pipe, but hasn't been deployed to the general public.

Is this important? It's impossible to tell. It all depends on how they quality
control and implement changes. Facebook is very interconnected and giving it a
third leg might cause a complication in how it runs. How it appears, given
that my wife's facebook can be on a server down for maintenance and my account
works perfectly fine, is that it might be in the facebook backend, but it
could be taking them months to safely roll it out without downing their entire
network.

Furthermore, who knows what will get released. I could have 3 blog posts in
the works, but I might drop one or two if it becomes irrelevant before
posting. I don't get why facebook is seemingly not allowed this courtesy,
maybe it isn't in Facebook's best interest to create a segregated network when
whites/blacks men/women dogs/cats can't access each others profiles or send
messages to each other. However, it might have a good idea, IE the ability to
block people who are harassing or spamming you.

