If that number peaked your interest and inclined to understand how they scale the technical infrastructure .. here is a good 1 hour and 14 min webcast be Jeff Raothschild of facebook talking about how they scaled their infrastructure to support this. webcast link

If you are not interested in the geek speak but curious about numbers look at some stats from facebook’s press ..

Statistics

Source

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Key component of facebook’s chat scalability is their channel server. They choose to use erlang a language that is fast getting the much needed attention for building real time infrastructure.

The channel servers are the most intricate piece of the backend. They’re responsible for queuing a given user’s messages and pushing them to their web browser via HTTP. We made an early decision to write the channel servers in Erlang. The language itself has many pros and cons, but we chose Erlang to power Chat because its model lends itself well to concurrent, distributed, and robust programming. It’s easy to model our millions of concurrent users with a few lightweight processes each, where the same tactic in, say, C++ would have been more daunting. Programming languages are always a tradeoff; Erlang makes some hard things easy but, unfortunately, some easy things hard.

Here are links to some of the facebook engineering notes.

Facebook chat and challenges from May 13, 2008 – http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=14218138919&id=9445547199&index=9

Chat stability and scalability (chris piro) - http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=51412338919

Engineering tech talk videos on chat – http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=631726942083

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Mark Zuckerberg is pretty sure the future of the company won’t really be as a destination Web site, but as the Web-wide platform that connects us not just to our friends, but also the businesses we transact with.

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The poll clarifies “substantial differences” between who is and isn’t using social networking sites and networking software, with 51% of all Americans not using Twitter or a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace. Of those who do use the sites, only 16% update their page at least once a day. Also, and despite the hype, only 5% of Americans are using Twitter, according to The Harris Poll.

Other poll results include:

• Three-quarters of those aged 18-34 years old (74%) have a Facebook or MySpace account but this quickly drops off the older one gets. Just one-quarter (24%) of those 55 and older have an account;
• Tweeting is also slightly more prevalent among the young, but not by much; 8% of 18-34 year olds use Twitter, 7% of those 35-44 use it, 4% of those aged 45-54 and just 1% of those 55 and older;
• While men and women use Twitter at the same levels (5% each), women are more likely to have a Facebook or MySpace account (52% versus 45%); and,
• There is also an educational difference in usage of social networking sites. Two in five people with a high school degree or less (40%) have a Facebook or MySpace account compared to 55% of those with some college and 52% of those with at least a college degree.
• 45% of adults believe social networking sites are popular, but they won’t pose a real threat to the domination of search sites (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) while just one in ten (9%) say they may become a threat. Fully 46% of Americans are not at all sure. Even among the largest users of the social networking sites, 18-34 year olds, three in five (62%) say they will not become a real threat to the search engines.

“The media may be all abuzz about Twittering, but mainstream America is not hopping on the same bandwagon. While the younger age groups are all about the social network sites, they haven’t yet migrated to Twitter. The question is will they or won’t they? If they had found it before the media had, there is a stronger possibility they would be increasing their usage, but they may already be looking for the next big thing – before it becomes a media darling,” according to The Harris Poll statement.

download the report (PDF)

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