Octazen Solutions is a two employees startup company in Malaysia developing a contact importer software that allow sites like Facebook to grow exponentially in users. A feature like Friend Find where a registered user, by simply entering his email address and password, will be able to send an invite to his entire contact list. No wonder that Facebook has more than 400 million users where 250 million added in the last year alone.
Last week, Facebook acquired Octazen Solutions. This “talent acquisition” as described on GigaOM, means that Octazen engineers are going to shutdown their business operations to join Facebook as it says on the company’s website. Read more…
It is confirmed that Microsoft reached a deal with Twitter and Facebook to add real-time updates into their search engine Bing. However, it only took few hours for Google to announce that they also got a similar deal with Twitter. No clear information is yet available regarding Facebook.
You can try the beta version of Bing Twitter implementation here, but don’t be surprised when you get the following message if your locale is not set united states.
TWITTER BETA
Sorry!
Bing Twitter Search is not available in this locale.
If you wish to access Bing Twitter Search, change your locale to United States.
Note: Changing your locale will affect all Bing pages. To change your locale in the future, click the United States link at the top right corner of any Bing page.
The feed from Facebook is said to work pretty much in the same way as with Twitter, however this is not available yet since Facebook has not opened its feed to public and they “need to be very careful about making sure the correct data is streamed.”, said Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg.
The weird thing in the story that Sandberg doesn’t mention any money involved in this deal, which of course I don’t really believe.
Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook gives an interesting presentation about “High performance at massive scale – lessons learned at Facebook” held at the center of networked systems at UC San Diego.
Some impressive facts presented
Facebook have 300M active users (no big secret)
They now have 30,000 server, adding new capacity daily.
They store 80 billion images (20 billion images in 4 sizes).
They serve 600,000 photos/second.
They generate more than 25 terabytes logging data per day
They have 230 engineers on staff, which means a ratio of more than 1 million active users per engineer…
Watch the webcast below Read more…
From the first day, Facebook came to public it faced rumors and complaints. One of the most serious complaints was actually filed November 19, 2008 by Leader Technologies, Inc in the United States district court for the district of Delaware for infringement of U.S Patent No. 7,139,761 in this district. This patent relates to a method and system for the management and storage of electronic information.
According to the latest public Court Order document dated 4th September 2009 (embedded below), Facebook objections were denied and the company will still need to produce its entire source code for Leader’s review no later than September 15, 2009
Read more…