Beautiful Architecture: Facebook Growing Up

This chapter covered the architecture of Facebook. Facebook, as a social networking site, has personal information available that can indicate the preferences of individuals on the web site. This information could be extremely useful to other sites that want to use that information, either for marketing or other applications.

The architecture of Facebook keeps security at a forefront, as no information can be divulged without an individual allowing it. Third party sites can interact with the information either remotely through the API or using FQL (a way of batching API requests). Alternatively, information can be displayed on the Facebook site itself using FBML, a limited version of HTML. In both of these cases, all interaction with data occurs on Facebook's servers, ensuring nothing is displayed that should be hidden.

I thought Facebook did a great job of keeping the architecture simple enough to understand, but still protect security of individuals by proctoring all interactions with the data. They also copied well known language paradigms in SQL and HTML to create FQL and FBML respectively. This makes the learning curve much easier for third party developers, ensuring that these interfaces are actually used and benefit Facebook by providing more content for users.