Between a major redesign, a quiet merger offer from Microsoft, and a rich application platform, Facebook has managed to remain in the social networking spotlight over the last couple of years. We recently had the opportunity to chat with Mike Schroepfer, VP of Facebook Engineering, about everything from open source efforts, to how many engineers it takes to release a chat service, to why Facebook Connect isn't really an identity management system.
But first, we talked about the culture shift of Schroepfer's move from Mozilla in August of this year.
"I feel amazingly fortunate that I've been able to work at a couple of places with top-notch engineers building products that real people use all the time." His new employer has improved his odds for getting into spontaneous conversations about making the world better through technology, though. "At Mozilla I had stickers on my laptop and I could get through a security checkpoint at the airport without being asked questions about Firefox and what was going on."
"But when I joined Facebook," Schroepfer continued, "... I went to the mechanic to pick up my car and had a ten minute discussion about reconnecting with old friends and family... So Facebook has, in my mind, the best opportunity on the planet by a long shot to build the next great web platform... taking that lens of what's important to me, my friends, and my family with Facebook Connect to other sites on the web."
How many engineers does it take to...
Our discussion next turned to how many engineers Schroepfer has at his disposal among Facebook's roughly 700 employees.
"Our engineering staff is in the few hundreds, and when you think about the 120 million international users on the site every day, that's a pretty small number." Some of Facebook's recent product launches haven't required even those numbers, however. "When you look at Facebook Chat or what we've done with Inbox, most of those products were launched with two engineers, maybe three."
"To be honest it's both a blessing and a curse, because we've got way more things that we'd like to do than we're capable of doing right now." Whether the company is large or small, Schroepfer mused, "is a matter of perspective."
Giving back to open source
Next in the conversation was Facebook's open source efforts, which can often be lost in the company's desire to be a central hub of friend activity and data collection. Recently, the company has open sourced projects like Thrift, a framework for scalable cross-language services development, and Scribe, a server for aggregating log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers.
Schroepfer also says that Facebook is also the largest user of Memcache, a distributed memory object caching system. "The reason why I know that is because we've run into a bunch of scalability problems that apparently no one else has, and as a result, have almost completely rewritten Memcache to scale to eight cores, to be able to sustain tens of millions of Memcache operations a second to run our site. So it's not just creating new things, but taking existing things and contributing this back to open source so other people can use it as well."
Of course, opening up isn't always on Facebook's to-do list. Some products, like Facebook Chat which was launched in April this year, are not yet officially accessible by third-party clients. While some apps like Adium have reverse engineered access to Facebook Chat, Schroepfer said "I don't know if we have any specific plans to open [it] up, but we have some cool stuff we're working on that I'd like to talk about shortly... some other additions to the capabilities of chat."