Facebook’s 10^9 users

Facebook hit 10^9, or one billion monthly active users, this morning.

Pundits are gonna pun and haters are gonna hate.

I’m still impressed.

Facebook manages a massive, sparse, graph. It’s a massive amount of data, using technology that didn’t even exist just five years ago.

They have data scientists inventing products that yet to exist.

And these products have to scale to one billion MAU’s.

What do you do that scales to one billion?

Cynicism about the trough aside – that’s a huge figure. In many ways, to scale from 10^6 to 10^9 was the hardest part. To scale from 10^9 to a multiple of that, say, 2 billion, that isn’t, comparatively, is hard.

Congrats to all the folks who helped scale those connections, and the complexity that goes with it. It’s absolutely amazing.

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I’m Christopher Berry.
I’m at Authintic.