facebook

We get there through iteration. We don’t try to build an architecture that is failproof. Building an architecture and worrying about it for months and months at a time before you actually go deploy it tends to not get us the result we want because by the time we’ve actually deployed something the problem has moved or there are more technologies available to solve different problems.

We take it seriously enough to say “there are no architects on the team.”

We do a very “you build it you own it” process, where any team or any individual or any engineer that builds or designs something, they own it, and they do the on-call for it.

On call is where we learn, and that’s how we improve over time.

You build a system…you don’t have to be perfect. Deploy it, and as long as you have enough detection and mitigation capabilities, you will do OK. And you will learn, and you will iterate over it, and you will get better over time.

From the NANOG73 keynote: “Operations first, feature second” by Facebook VP of Network Engineering Najam Ahmad. It’s at about the 10:20 mark in the video:

Facebook Connect went down hard tonight. HuffPo reports that their site was redirecting to a Facebook error page, even when people weren’t attempting to log in.

Yep. Busted third-party JavaScript brings portions of the Internet to its knees: huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/fac…

— Kent Brewster (@kentbrew) February 8, 2013

It makes me more comfortable with our decision to strip so many 3rd party javascripts from GigaOM during our last redesign.

You haven’t fixed the BING search page on Cafe World. It comes up when I click on an oven, when I click on a mission and then everything is ruined.

FRONTERVILLE:

I haven’t been able to play Fronterville for FOUR days. I can send gifts, but don’t know if anyone receives them but they must because I get gifts.

But I have a spouse and it is stuck. It won’t custom or random or play or anything and it freezes the whole page so I can’t do a thing and there is a white avatar that says spouse? I am sick and tired of trying to clear land and lo and behold a bear appears or a fox or a snake immediately. That is disgusting. I had FIVE bears in 30 minutes.

I even had BING search page when I clicked on Farmville and it is all white and nothing and I have to reload and it takes time.

Thank you, [name removed]

All Facebook is happy to share the ten laws of Facebook advertising, but will those rules lead to better results than the .02% CTR Bob Gilbreath got a year ago?

[Facebook’s guide to sharing][1] details some meta tags to make that sharing work better:

In order to make sure that the preview is always correctly populated, you should add the tags shown below to your html. An example news story could have the following:

> 
> As shown, title contains the preview title, description contains the preview summary and image_src contains the preview image. Please make sure that none of the content fields contain any html markup because it will be stripped out. For consistency’s sake, please use the 
> 
> <meta />
> tag to provide text data for the preview, and the 
> 
> <link />
> tag for any source urls.
> 
> The title and summary tags are the minimum requirements for any preview, so make sure to include these two.

 [1]: http://www.facebook.com/share_partners.php "Facebook | Share Partners"

NPR : Back to School: Reading, Writing and Internet Safety

As students return to school in Virginia, there’s something new in their curriculum. Virginia is the first state to require public schools to teach Internet safety.

The Associated Press reports a composite nude posted to facebook has earned a UNH student a restraining order:

A University of New Hampshire student got a temporary restraining order against another student who combined an image of her face with an explicit photo of another woman’s body, then posted the composite on his Facebook page.

A judge ordered Owen Sanborn, of Laconia, to stay at least 100 feet away from the woman and barred him from posting her “likeness or name on any Internet site,” pending a final hearing.

The woman’s lawyer, Bryan Gould, said the posting was the latest episode in a series. Social networking sites like Facebook can encourage stalking-type behavior, he said.

“It’s sort of a way for someone like this to sort of test the waters, and that’s what makes it dangerous,” Gould said.