This week, you might be surprised by something on your Facebook. The site is celebrating its 10th birthday in style, and Mark Zuckerberg has gone all out to make it a memorable event. Hundreds of millions of Facebook users will be able to enjoy a video summary of their virtual life on Facebook, called “Look back”, one of the largest video projects of all time, according to Nick Kwiatek, the head engineer of this project. He and his team have spent the last months scaling down the rendering the time it used to take to create one of these videos from 17 minutes to just 1.
Two groups within Facebook played a particularly important role: Everstore, the team in charge of media storage, and Moonshot, the team tasked with allocating idle server power to doing some heavy lifting whenever possible. They are aware that Facebook is one of the only companies that have the resources to take on a project of such a colossal size, even if the optimization of the servers was hard work, making them capable of doing the job for so many people in such a short time.
A compilation of your most “liked” moments
We all remember the “Year in review” compilations issued before (i.e. at the end of last year), but we had never experienced it in video format. It`s a complication of about the 15 most important (or “liked”) images, statuses and life events, with a catchy tune in the background. Some may find it cheesy, but I know they will secretly love it. After all, Facebook has become as normal to us as looking back through a photo-album. So why not do it on a screen, and in video?
In its first decade, Facebook has harvested users from all over the globe keen to communicate with friends, post updates and share photographs. The once-humble network created by Mark Zuckerberg while at Harvard University has grown to become a multi-billion dollar company. Last week the company reported record revenues of $2.5bn “Over the coming months and years, you’ll see us continue focusing on many of the same themes but now with greater scale, ambition and resources,” said Zuckerberg about the future of the company.
15 interesting facts about Facebook
- 1 out of every 6 people in the world uses Facebook
- That means about 1.23 billion active monthly users
- Facebook was launched in February 2004 by Harvard students, and was originally called TheFacebook.
- Most of the users are from Asia (30%), while Europe follows with a 23%, and the US and Canada tag behind with a low 16%
- However, the U.S. is the country with the most active monthly users (158.922.860), followed by afar by Brazil, India and Indonesia.
- The most “liked” image ever was one fo Barack Obama hugging his wife, that got a whopping 4.4 million “likes”.
- The average American Facebook user is 41 years old and has 228 friends
- In 2013, the most talked-about topic was Pope Francis
- Facebook´s average revenue per user is $2.14. However, U.S. and Canadian users are worth $6.03.
- They have 6 billion “likes” every day
- In 2013, the number of people checking Facebook from mobile devices is higher than those checking it from traditional PCs.
- Every day, more than 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook.
- About 6 of 10 users visit Facebook on a daily basis.
- The world’s most checked-in location is Disneyland
- A federal court has ruled that Facebook “likes” are protected free speech in the U.S.
