In context of this chapter, I was reading an article by Facebook VP of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger on how to manage the growth of users/data while rolling out features on a regular basis. He mentions that for any organization to be successful it needs to be embrace change rapidly. He also mentions that unlike other organizations, Facebook does not have QA. They simply have a "cradle-to-grave" lifecycle of their code. Coming back to the chapter, I would like to comment on the application platform and the churn cycle of applications developed for Facebook. In a recent presentation, it was mentioned that nine of the top fifteen applications for Facebook are new. But on the upside, there is a decline in the churn trends for the top few spots due to Facebook's efforts to control application spam.
Statistically, the Facebook API has been extremely popular, with nearly 12000 applications produced since the launch of the API. I think that the main reasons for its success are its openness (in deciding what customers want), its targeted audience, the lure of potential riches to developers whi can decide how to make their application into a good business model without much interference, by having a lot of features which drive "viral" growth and so on. Inspite of the privacy concerns (which are anyway present in most social networks), the API has proven itself to be a strong driver to the growth of Facebook over the last year. Among the several features in Facebook mentioned in this chapter, I would like to single out FQL for the advantages it possesses: reducing response size, providing a common syntax for all methods and for condensing Facebook queries.
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