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Facebook Shadow Profiles
Aguiar, Peukert, Schaefer, and Ullrich (CESifo, 2022) quantify Facebook's cross-web tracking via its engagement buttons, finding that 52% of websites visited by US users employ Facebook's tracking technology. Facebook builds shadow profiles even for non-users — the scope of cross-platform surveillance is much larger than most users assume.
Presto: Interacting with Petabytes of Data at Facebook
Hacker News discussion on Facebook's newly open-sourced Presto SQL engine, capable of querying petabytes of data interactively. A watershed moment — before Presto, interactive SQL at Facebook scale wasn't possible.
High Performance at Massive Scale: Lessons Learned at Facebook
Summary of a 2009 Facebook engineering talk on high-performance systems at massive scale — covering their memcached deployment, MySQL sharding, and the operational realities of running at hundreds of millions of users. An early public window into big-company distributed systems practice.
Facebook Unveils Presto for 250 PB Data Warehouse
GigaOm's coverage of Facebook unveiling Presto, their distributed SQL query engine for interactive queries against a 250 petabyte data warehouse. Presto addressed the core limitation of Hive — batch latency — by using a pipelined execution model that avoided writing intermediate results to disk.
You Are More Influential Than You Think You Are
Jay Shah's post on Facebook's finding that ordinary users have larger social influence than they think — driven by the long tail of weak-tie connections that Facebook's social graph captured better than individuals' self-perception.
Data Science of the Facebook World
Stephen Wolfram's data science analysis of Facebook social graph patterns — age cohort differences in network structure, relationship status effects, and how Wolfram Language's data computation tools enable individual-level analysis of social network data. A 2013 example of using data for personal-scale social science.
Facebook's Next-Generation Servers
Data Center Knowledge coverage of Facebook's next-generation server hardware in 2012 — part of the Open Compute Project rollout that made hyperscale data center design public and challenged the traditional server vendor model.
Facebook Seeks Next-Generation Big Data Tools
InformationWeek's 2012 report on Facebook's efforts to move beyond Hadoop for its next-generation big data infrastructure — one of the first major signals that the tech industry's heaviest Hadoop user was already looking past it.
Three Tips to Succeed as a Programmer
Facebook Engineering's post on three principles for succeeding as a programmer — written at a moment when Facebook was the most visible example of what high-performing engineering culture could produce. Likely covers ownership, breadth vs depth, and learning from code review.
You Earn Facebook an Average of $1.21 Per Quarter
TechCrunch's 2012 analysis showing Facebook earned $1.21 per user per quarter — a baseline figure that reframed the product/user relationship. Published just before Facebook's IPO, it crystallized the 'you are the product' critique.
The Chart That Scared Zuckerberg Into Spending $1 Billion On Instagram
Business Insider's reporting on the internal mobile growth data that motivated Facebook's $1B Instagram acquisition — Instagram was growing faster on mobile than Facebook itself. A concrete case study in defensive acquisition driven by internal metrics.