Ng: Managing Facebook database

I’VE always imagined what it is to manage the database of Facebook, the world’s most famous social media site that is inching close to 1 billion members. According to CNet, it’s huge. The database is now nearing 100 petabytes (that’s 100 million gigabytes, if I am not mistaken). Moreover, this is what you have to manage every day: 2.7 billion likes from over a few hundred million people logging in; over 300 million photos uploaded and over 500 terabytes of new data.

Moreover, I wrote before that Facebook believes that a few million of their accounts (up to eight percent) can be duplicates or fake. Now, I have really experienced why fake accounts are necessary. I wrote also before that people create accounts to vote on or “like” things. We got involved in a contest where the group with the most ‘likes’ would win something and I suddenly found that there were other groups that had a lot of ‘likes’ that came from people that did not have any profiles or were hardly active for anything else. I also noted that in Facebook, there are some accounts that were created solely to attack or malign people, products or companies. If that is so, then I really think it is only proper that Facebook would validate accounts in whatever way to insure that all accounts are authentic.

In another matter, one of the most persistent rumors currently in technology is that Apple would come out with a 7-inch iPad. If you recall, Apple produces the iPhone or iTouch which is about four inches and the 9.7 inch iPad. People think that a seven-inch device would be nice but a few years ago, Steve Jobs famously said a seven-inch tablet would not be desirable. He said it would not be as easy to use as the iPad while being too bulky and more expensive than the iPhone.

Now, it seems that after Google introduced the seven-inch Nexus (with Samsung and Amazon also having seven-inch tablets), it seems that Apple may introduce their own version too. It may actually mean that people actually now prefer smartphones that have five- to seven-inch screens. I know Samsung’s five-inch big screen phones have been selling a lot. Its screen is big enough to play games, read books, type and view pictures and videos clearly, especially now with the new LED technology they are
using.

Also, the scale of production also means that it might be a lot cheaper to produce – Apple sells their 9.7 inch iPads at upwards of $500 while many competitors (and many also speculate, including Apple) can easily produce and sell seven-inch tablets at around $200, which is a price point that seems to attract a lot of buyers. Will it make a really attractive Christmas gift? I guess time will tell.

(www.twitter.com/wilsonng)