Facebook is certainly among the top-most used social media apps worldwide. Commanding more than 1.94 billion monthly users, this social media app is certainly too big to ignore. Looking at the Facebook statistics, you will be awed by the tremendous variance with other popular social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. Since its inception, Facebook has been attempting to increase user ability to make it easy for new users adapt to this app. This includes synergy with other social media platforms.
Just to mention, Facebook is a for-profit co-operation that does social media and social networking services. It is based in Menlo Park, California. The website was launched by Mark Zuckerberg on 4th February 2004. This social media app can be accessed through various devices including smartphones, tablet computers, desktops, and laptops. They only require an internet and mobile network connection.
Registering to the site is pretty simple. After registering to this site, users create a profile, with their names, school attended, age, occupation and other personal details. Users can also add other users as their ‘friends,’ exchange messages, update photos, share digital videos, links, and status. There is much to be done from this website. Since its inception, there is a lot of data on this platform. This can be viewed from the Facebook Graph Search, announced by the company on January 15th, 2013. The graph provides precise answers on the data present on the site.
Technical Aspects of Facebook
The primary color of the website is blue. The explanation behind this is quite funny. So to say, it was chosen so because of Zuckerberg, the founder, is red-green color blind. Therefore, blue is the richest color he can see. The website is built in PHP, a source code transformer. PHP is compiled with HipHop for PHP built by Facebook engineers that turn the basic PHP to C++. This reduces the CPU consumption on the servers by approximately 50%.
The app is developed as one monolithic application. Chuck Rossi, a build engineer at Facebook, states that Facebook compiles fitting a 1.5 GB binary blob that is distributed to the servers using BitTorrent-based release system. According to Rossi, it takes 15 minutes to build and another 15 minutes to release the data to servers. Both processes; building and releasing are zero downtime besides the new changes rolled out every day.
To store data across the distributed machines, Facebook uses a combination platforms referred to as HBase. With this architecture, new events are preferably stored in log files, which are tailed. The various sequence of events is involved with the ultimate result being an even distribution of data across the distributed machines.
Data stored in the log files are read using Ptail. This is an integrated tool built to aggregate data making it readable from multiple scribe stores. For message systems, Facebook uses the momentum platform to allow delivery of enormous amounts of emails and messages sent to users on a daily basis. There are much more tech-related aspects of this multi-million user social media platform.
Facebook Stats
Just to provide insights, there are various astonishing stats about this giant tech platform. Just to mention, some of the outstanding stats include:
- There are approximately 1.15 billion active mobile users increasing at 23% per year. There is a combined total of 1.94 billion users as of March 2017.
- Daily, 1.28 billion people log onto Facebook actively.
- 10 million links for websites are shared, liked and viewed daily
- 307 million people participate actively in Facebook in Europe.
- Up to five profiles are created every second
- Out of 100%, there are 76% female and 66% male.
- Highest traffic on the website is experienced between 1-3pm.
- Engagement is 18% higher on Thursday and Friday’s.
- There are approximately 83 million fake Facebook profiles.
- Per day, there is a total of 300 million photo uploads.
- In every 60 seconds, there is an average of 510,000 comments posted, 293,000 status updated and a total of 136,000 photos uploaded.
- As from May 2013, there are approximately 4.75 billion pieces of content shared daily, a 95% increase from August 2012.
- 42% of marketers attest that Facebook is critical to their businesses.
It is due to the above statistics that Facebook is looking to make their user interface much friendly. The recent update pertains putting notifications under one roof.
Facebook’s New Notification System
This is the latest tweak from Facebook in a bid to go beyond social networking. The aim of this new feature is to bring together the Facebook family closer. Spotted by the Tech Crunch, there seem to be notifications popping in the Facebook app. The notifications streamline and are aggregated from Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram uploads. This is among the strategy by this company to achieve social media synergy, which seems to be working pretty well.
For social media enthusiasts, it is a welcome move as you will not toil back and forth checking personal profiles on the different platforms. So to say, you won’t have to open and close separate apps every time a notification pings. You can easily flip back and forth the news feeds. This is possible by checking the noticeable icon positioned on the right upper hand corner of your smartphone or tablet screen.
Also Read: You Can Now Use FastText Library Feature from Facebook on your Mobile
Conclusion
Achieving social media synergy seems to be possible. Though still in its pre-roll out phase, the Facebook notification system appears to work really well. You can check on your friend’s update from Facebook, Messenger or Instagram.
