Notes from Facebook Developer Garage, Chennai

On 19th September, a Facebook Developers' Garage took place in Chennai, Organized for facebook, by BusinessBlogging and sponsored by OrangeScape. David Recordon and others from facebook, along with few other speakers spoke at the event and interacted with facebook developers and users

This post offers some information about facebook, which might be of interest to most of you, as a facebook user.

David Recordon, in his talk said "Facebook uses mySQL... If we lose data its because of human error n not mySQL" When I updated this to twitter and facebook, Nitin Salgar, an expert in SQL related stuff, promptly hit back, saying "Negative. Fb migrated from mySQL clusters to home brew map-reduce based NOSQL database solution called "Cassandra" ( an apache incumbator project now)" I invited David Recordon to my laptop and showed above comment, for which he promptly agreed that it is true.

• On being asked by a user "How does Php6 going to help developers?" David Recordon said "I know nothing much about php6"
• For the question: "Why can't we add adsense kind of code into our facebook page and monetize it", David Recordon said facebook is exploring multiple advertising/revenue sharing models and details should be out soon.
• For my question, when is facebook places coming to India, David said he has no idea...
• David said they planned to kill the term "Facebook Connect" and call it signin with facebook, but felt this is sounding like a bad idea as facebook Connect was a well established term.

Post event, me, Kiruba Shankar, Rajsekar (organizers of the event) and Kevin D Souza (another facebook employee) caught up with David Recordon for dinner, David was very open to experimenting with Indian food. He sampled several Indian dishes at Sangeetha restaurant and said he liked most of them. He also said he loves his job at facebook very much.
Couple of speakers had used obsolete/old data in their presentations. David informally said "I could lose my job if I use such statistics"

While there're mobile clients to update your facebook account from mobiles, there're very few options to effectively manage a facebook page from a mobile phone. When I brought this to David's attention, he said the team should be aware of it and solution should be out soon. (Right now the only way to update a facebook page from mobile is to send an email to a pre-designated email id given by facebook)

Facebook has now made it difficult to reject a friendship request. There's only an "Approve" and "not now" option and no "Reject" option. (one has to follow more complex way to delete all pending requests). This is obviously to encourage people to add more and more friends, and eventually increase facebook's inventory of users.

• Facebook's India office in Hyderabad is all set to be inaugurated on 30th September, at Hyderabad
• Also Facebook is now allowing city specific advertising in India. So far it was only country level.