At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.

The other week, when representatives from Facebook mentioned that they'd be open-sourcing significant portions of their platform, I hazarded a guess that they would be providing at most a set of APIs. Now that Facebook's actually released some code under the aegis of the Facebook Open Platform, I had a look-see. To my delight, I saw more than just APIs.

"Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us."

Having increased its commitment to open source in recent months, Facebook announced on Friday that a piece of internally created software, "Scribe", will be released back to the open source community.

"...Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble. Facebook users are locked into Facebook, just as iTunes locks music fans to Apple's iPod..."

If you are a developer that read about yesterday's Facebook Insights announcement but want examples of tools that can be implemented, look no further than Facebook's open source Insights API sample that was released yesterday.

While privacy and open society advocates have been concerned about the dominance of Google’s search engine for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook’s growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends and colleagues online.

The news started to emerge in various Twitter feeds and personal blog posts Monday: David Recordon, a Six Apart developer and prominent open standards advocate, has left the blog software company to take a job at Facebook.

Facebook announced on Monday that a large portion of its 3rd party application platform was available as open source.