Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Instagram signs deal with major ad agency
Instagram signs deal with major ad agency
POSTED: 08 Mar 2014 07:30
Facebook-owned photo sharing service Instagram said it has landed its first deal with a major ad agency.
SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook-owned photo sharing service Instagram on Friday said it has landed its first deal with a major ad agency.
The leading social network wouldn't disclose financial aspects of the alliance with Omnicom, but online reports indicated it could be worth as much as $100 million in ads from clients the agency represents.
"Omnicom shares our passion for and understanding of the mobile Instagram community," Facebook director of market operations Jim Squires said in an email reply to an AFP inquiry.
"Our teams are going to work hand in hand to develop and execute campaigns that provide people with amazing imagery - and drive meaningful business results for advertisers."
Squires maintained that Instagram's advertising strategy will continue to involve displaying a limited number of high-quality images or videos from brands that already have a strong presence at Instagram.
Instagram in November began displaying ads as Facebook moved to start making money from the smartphone photo sharing service it bought in a billion-dollar deal in early 2012.
Instagram's opening roster of advertisers included Adidas, Lexus, PayPal, Burberry and Ben & Jerry's ice cream.
California-based Facebook is carefully adding magazine-quality photo ads to Instagram as it hopes to bring in revenue from the service without alienating users.
- AFP/fl
- wong chee tat :)
POSTED: 08 Mar 2014 07:30
Facebook-owned photo sharing service Instagram said it has landed its first deal with a major ad agency.
SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook-owned photo sharing service Instagram on Friday said it has landed its first deal with a major ad agency.
The leading social network wouldn't disclose financial aspects of the alliance with Omnicom, but online reports indicated it could be worth as much as $100 million in ads from clients the agency represents.
"Omnicom shares our passion for and understanding of the mobile Instagram community," Facebook director of market operations Jim Squires said in an email reply to an AFP inquiry.
"Our teams are going to work hand in hand to develop and execute campaigns that provide people with amazing imagery - and drive meaningful business results for advertisers."
Squires maintained that Instagram's advertising strategy will continue to involve displaying a limited number of high-quality images or videos from brands that already have a strong presence at Instagram.
Instagram in November began displaying ads as Facebook moved to start making money from the smartphone photo sharing service it bought in a billion-dollar deal in early 2012.
Instagram's opening roster of advertisers included Adidas, Lexus, PayPal, Burberry and Ben & Jerry's ice cream.
California-based Facebook is carefully adding magazine-quality photo ads to Instagram as it hopes to bring in revenue from the service without alienating users.
- AFP/fl
- wong chee tat :)
Monday, March 3, 2014
Monday, November 25, 2013
'Let's try and not have a human do it': How one Facebook techie can run 20,000 servers
'Let's try and not have a human do it': How one Facebook techie can run 20,000 servers
Summary: Facebook on how it has managed to ease the pain of running one of the world's largest fleet of servers.
By Nick Heath | November 25, 2013 -- 12:43 GMT (20:43 SGT)
How many people does it take to run 20,000 servers? In the case of Facebook just the one.
Facebook's low overhead is born of necessity. When you run a computing infrastructure supporting the Likes of more than one billion users worldwide – the less human input needed to keep it ticking over, the better.
The philosophy of the social media giant is if a job doesn't need to be carried out by a person, "let's try and not have a human do it", said Tom Furlong, Facebook's director of site operations.
Facebook cuts manual maintenance of its IT infrastructure wherever possible. Servers and drives can be replaced without tools thanks to their Open Compute Project (OCP) designs, a system called Cyborg fixes tracts of misbehaving servers automatically and tools like Chef help manage thousands of servers at a time.
One of the latest of these manual labour-saving tools is Cluster Planner. Facebook regularly deploys servers in their thousands to meet the constantly changing demands of its business. Cluster Planner helps the company find the best home for these clusters within its global datacentre estate.
"Cluster Planner helps us calculate where we're going to put machines, so we can best utilise the infrastructure that we have," said Furlong.
"It basically replaces an incredibly manual process," he said, adding it had reduced cluster deployment time from days to hours.
Cluster Planner takes a snapshot of what sits where in Facebook's estate. It aggregates data about Facebook's computer systems – such as server components, average CPU utilisation and number of IOPs – and details about the datacentres, including electrical capacity and available floor space.
"It's normally a very cumbersome process for engineers to do the math calculations. With Cluster Planner you can do that very quickly, so what took us days before now takes us hours."
A core challenge for Facebook when cataloguing infrastructure spread across its global datacentres is ensuring consistency in how the data is collected and labelled, so Facebook can properly aggregate data. For example ensuring that data derived from generators at its datacentre in Prineville, Oregon is labelled in the same way as that collected from generators at its Forest City installation, more than 2,500 miles away.
Cluster Planner is in beta, its tools are being worked on and Facebook is in the process of hooking it into all of its datacentres.
Keeping track of Swiss cheese clusters
The make-up of Facebook's datacentres is moulded by the ebb and flow of business demands, with its computing estate changing shape to support alterations to systems and the roll out of new software. Furlong believes Facebook's IT operations could become more efficient by using systems like Cluster Planner to capture information about the composition of server clusters as they change during their lifetime.
"You don't put a server in production and then have [it handling] exactly the same workload during its three year lifespan. It's a moving landscape," said Furlong.
"Over the lifespan of the cluster you start to see things disappearing from it. You get people saying 'Oh there are underutilised resources in that cluster, let's put them in that new cluster that we're bringing up'.
"After a while there's like this 'Swiss cheese' [cluster], which I know by looking at it doesn't have enough machines in it to be used efficiently.
"If we had something that allowed us to better calculate what that 'Swiss cheese' is, we could go back to capacity planning and say 'Hey send us some more stuff' or 'How about we compact this and use some free rows for other things'. Those are the types of things I want us to be able to do over the lifetime of the equipment, so we don't have this static view of the world."
Automating away the pain
Maintaining one of the world's largest fleet of servers could be a massive hassle.
Facebook eases that pain in several ways, such as by using OCP-designed servers, storage and datacentre equipments that have been stripped down to the core components needed to carry out specific computing workloads, an approach that the OCP refers to as 'vanity-free design'.
These designs not only remove unnecessary screws from servers and drives so they can be installed without tools, but also reduce the number of components that can go wrong. The company estimates that using OCP hardware has cut the time its staff spend on maintenance jobs by more than 50 percent.
Also cutting the number of manual repairs are automated software tools like the aforementioned Cyborg, which monitor Facebook's infrastructure and try to correct problems without manual intervention.
"We've said that one datacentre technician can basically handle about 20,000 machines," Furlong said.
"One of the reasons why we can operate as efficiently as we do in terms of server repairs is we have huge numbers of automated systems that collect and analyse data.
"Cyborg goes out and tries to do its own server repairs, like a soft reboot or something that is an easy way to fix a system that's hung up. Cyborg keeps literally thousands of potential tickets from ever hitting a human hand.
"The more stuff we can have a system do, the better. I don't want to employ armies of people to do the things I can automate out. I want the people who are there to do high value work, the more complex repairs, the installs and de-installs, and all the kind of things that you need people to do."
Furlong is also examining ways to cut the manual work needed to add new hardware to Facebook's inventory system, and is considering automated alternatives to its current system of adding items by manually scanning barcodes.
"Say we have a setup where you just snap the new thing in and the system recognises it then updates all of your inventory systems," he said.
While the scale of Facebook's IT operations can be difficult to manage, its size can be an asset when it comes to weeding out problems in the infrastructure. Furlong recalls the company spotting a recurring fault with a small number of motherboards in its OCP servers when they were installed in its Prineville datacentre.
"What we realised was we actually had the same failures in all of our legacy equipment, we just couldn't see it before because the sample sizes were small," he said.
"That's the beauty of having a large sample size to look at, you can knock things out that keep you from having to do a whole bunch of work [in the future]."
If Facebook is to continue to grow its 1.1 billion-strong user base it will need to continue work at sweating its datacentres, but Furlong believes there are plenty more efficiencies to wring out.
"To me that is the Holy Grail of this, to look at that server to datacentre ratio and be able to say 'I can get more servers into my datacentre'," he said.
"I think we do a good job of that today but I absolutely believe there is room for improvement."
- wong chee tat :)
Summary: Facebook on how it has managed to ease the pain of running one of the world's largest fleet of servers.
By Nick Heath | November 25, 2013 -- 12:43 GMT (20:43 SGT)
How many people does it take to run 20,000 servers? In the case of Facebook just the one.
Facebook's low overhead is born of necessity. When you run a computing infrastructure supporting the Likes of more than one billion users worldwide – the less human input needed to keep it ticking over, the better.
The philosophy of the social media giant is if a job doesn't need to be carried out by a person, "let's try and not have a human do it", said Tom Furlong, Facebook's director of site operations.
Facebook cuts manual maintenance of its IT infrastructure wherever possible. Servers and drives can be replaced without tools thanks to their Open Compute Project (OCP) designs, a system called Cyborg fixes tracts of misbehaving servers automatically and tools like Chef help manage thousands of servers at a time.
One of the latest of these manual labour-saving tools is Cluster Planner. Facebook regularly deploys servers in their thousands to meet the constantly changing demands of its business. Cluster Planner helps the company find the best home for these clusters within its global datacentre estate.
"Cluster Planner helps us calculate where we're going to put machines, so we can best utilise the infrastructure that we have," said Furlong.
"It basically replaces an incredibly manual process," he said, adding it had reduced cluster deployment time from days to hours.
Cluster Planner takes a snapshot of what sits where in Facebook's estate. It aggregates data about Facebook's computer systems – such as server components, average CPU utilisation and number of IOPs – and details about the datacentres, including electrical capacity and available floor space.
"It's normally a very cumbersome process for engineers to do the math calculations. With Cluster Planner you can do that very quickly, so what took us days before now takes us hours."
A core challenge for Facebook when cataloguing infrastructure spread across its global datacentres is ensuring consistency in how the data is collected and labelled, so Facebook can properly aggregate data. For example ensuring that data derived from generators at its datacentre in Prineville, Oregon is labelled in the same way as that collected from generators at its Forest City installation, more than 2,500 miles away.
Cluster Planner is in beta, its tools are being worked on and Facebook is in the process of hooking it into all of its datacentres.
Keeping track of Swiss cheese clusters
The make-up of Facebook's datacentres is moulded by the ebb and flow of business demands, with its computing estate changing shape to support alterations to systems and the roll out of new software. Furlong believes Facebook's IT operations could become more efficient by using systems like Cluster Planner to capture information about the composition of server clusters as they change during their lifetime.
"You don't put a server in production and then have [it handling] exactly the same workload during its three year lifespan. It's a moving landscape," said Furlong.
"Over the lifespan of the cluster you start to see things disappearing from it. You get people saying 'Oh there are underutilised resources in that cluster, let's put them in that new cluster that we're bringing up'.
"After a while there's like this 'Swiss cheese' [cluster], which I know by looking at it doesn't have enough machines in it to be used efficiently.
"If we had something that allowed us to better calculate what that 'Swiss cheese' is, we could go back to capacity planning and say 'Hey send us some more stuff' or 'How about we compact this and use some free rows for other things'. Those are the types of things I want us to be able to do over the lifetime of the equipment, so we don't have this static view of the world."
Automating away the pain
Maintaining one of the world's largest fleet of servers could be a massive hassle.
Facebook eases that pain in several ways, such as by using OCP-designed servers, storage and datacentre equipments that have been stripped down to the core components needed to carry out specific computing workloads, an approach that the OCP refers to as 'vanity-free design'.
These designs not only remove unnecessary screws from servers and drives so they can be installed without tools, but also reduce the number of components that can go wrong. The company estimates that using OCP hardware has cut the time its staff spend on maintenance jobs by more than 50 percent.
Also cutting the number of manual repairs are automated software tools like the aforementioned Cyborg, which monitor Facebook's infrastructure and try to correct problems without manual intervention.
"We've said that one datacentre technician can basically handle about 20,000 machines," Furlong said.
"One of the reasons why we can operate as efficiently as we do in terms of server repairs is we have huge numbers of automated systems that collect and analyse data.
"Cyborg goes out and tries to do its own server repairs, like a soft reboot or something that is an easy way to fix a system that's hung up. Cyborg keeps literally thousands of potential tickets from ever hitting a human hand.
"The more stuff we can have a system do, the better. I don't want to employ armies of people to do the things I can automate out. I want the people who are there to do high value work, the more complex repairs, the installs and de-installs, and all the kind of things that you need people to do."
Furlong is also examining ways to cut the manual work needed to add new hardware to Facebook's inventory system, and is considering automated alternatives to its current system of adding items by manually scanning barcodes.
"Say we have a setup where you just snap the new thing in and the system recognises it then updates all of your inventory systems," he said.
While the scale of Facebook's IT operations can be difficult to manage, its size can be an asset when it comes to weeding out problems in the infrastructure. Furlong recalls the company spotting a recurring fault with a small number of motherboards in its OCP servers when they were installed in its Prineville datacentre.
"What we realised was we actually had the same failures in all of our legacy equipment, we just couldn't see it before because the sample sizes were small," he said.
"That's the beauty of having a large sample size to look at, you can knock things out that keep you from having to do a whole bunch of work [in the future]."
If Facebook is to continue to grow its 1.1 billion-strong user base it will need to continue work at sweating its datacentres, but Furlong believes there are plenty more efficiencies to wring out.
"To me that is the Holy Grail of this, to look at that server to datacentre ratio and be able to say 'I can get more servers into my datacentre'," he said.
"I think we do a good job of that today but I absolutely believe there is room for improvement."
- wong chee tat :)
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Zuckerberg earned over US$2b at Facebook in 2012
Zuckerberg earned over US$2b at Facebook in 2012
POSTED: 27 Apr 2013 10:16 AM
Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg earned more than US$2 billion worth of stock and US$503,000 in base pay last year.
SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg earned more than US$2 billion worth of stock and US$503,000 in base pay last year for running the world's leading social network.
Zuckerberg was also given bonuses that added up to slightly more than US$266,000, according to a Facebook filing on Friday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
He received US$1.22 million in "other compensation," more than half of which was said in the filing to involve the use of chartered aircraft for travel by Zuckerberg and guests as part of a "comprehensive security program."
Facebook provided US regulators a breakdown of executive compensation and other matters that will be topics at an annual meeting of shareholders set to take place on June 11.
"In the first quarter of 2012, the compensation committee decided to increase the base salaries of our executive officers, other than our CEO," Facebook said in the document.
"Accordingly, our compensation committee increased the base salary of each executive officer, other than our CEO, by US$35,000 or US$40,000."
Zuckerberg has served as chairman of the board at Facebook since the beginning of last year.
His base pay will remain the same this year, while chief operations officer Sheryl Sandberg's was raised to US$340,000, according to the filing. Her bonus last year added up to US$276,730, the paperwork indicated.
Sandberg was paid US$321,000 last year, along with a bonus of US$276,730 and about US$25.6 million worth of stock awards, Facebook told the FTC.
Sandberg's bonus "reflected her leadership in growing our revenue year over year and her strategic guidance in various business matters," the filing said.
Zuckerberg exercised options to acquire 60 million shares of Facebook stock, which were valued at just shy of US$2.28 billion, according to the SEC filing.
He holds 607,599,549 shares of Class B stock in Facebook and another 1,939,987 in Class A shares, the company said in the paperwork.
The SEC in March endorsed a Nasdaq exchange plan to create a US$62 million pool of cash to cover trading losses due to computer glitches that disrupted the launch of Facebook shares onto the market.
The huge electronic market's foul-up marred the US$16 billion Facebook share issue in May, the most hotly awaited initial public offering on the US markets in years.
The stock hit a high of US$45 on the first day, but slid below US$18 in the following weeks. Facebook shares were trading at US$26.85 at the Nasdaq close on Friday.
- AFP/jc
-wong chee tat :)
POSTED: 27 Apr 2013 10:16 AM
Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg earned more than US$2 billion worth of stock and US$503,000 in base pay last year.
SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg earned more than US$2 billion worth of stock and US$503,000 in base pay last year for running the world's leading social network.
Zuckerberg was also given bonuses that added up to slightly more than US$266,000, according to a Facebook filing on Friday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
He received US$1.22 million in "other compensation," more than half of which was said in the filing to involve the use of chartered aircraft for travel by Zuckerberg and guests as part of a "comprehensive security program."
Facebook provided US regulators a breakdown of executive compensation and other matters that will be topics at an annual meeting of shareholders set to take place on June 11.
"In the first quarter of 2012, the compensation committee decided to increase the base salaries of our executive officers, other than our CEO," Facebook said in the document.
"Accordingly, our compensation committee increased the base salary of each executive officer, other than our CEO, by US$35,000 or US$40,000."
Zuckerberg has served as chairman of the board at Facebook since the beginning of last year.
His base pay will remain the same this year, while chief operations officer Sheryl Sandberg's was raised to US$340,000, according to the filing. Her bonus last year added up to US$276,730, the paperwork indicated.
Sandberg was paid US$321,000 last year, along with a bonus of US$276,730 and about US$25.6 million worth of stock awards, Facebook told the FTC.
Sandberg's bonus "reflected her leadership in growing our revenue year over year and her strategic guidance in various business matters," the filing said.
Zuckerberg exercised options to acquire 60 million shares of Facebook stock, which were valued at just shy of US$2.28 billion, according to the SEC filing.
He holds 607,599,549 shares of Class B stock in Facebook and another 1,939,987 in Class A shares, the company said in the paperwork.
The SEC in March endorsed a Nasdaq exchange plan to create a US$62 million pool of cash to cover trading losses due to computer glitches that disrupted the launch of Facebook shares onto the market.
The huge electronic market's foul-up marred the US$16 billion Facebook share issue in May, the most hotly awaited initial public offering on the US markets in years.
The stock hit a high of US$45 on the first day, but slid below US$18 in the following weeks. Facebook shares were trading at US$26.85 at the Nasdaq close on Friday.
- AFP/jc
-wong chee tat :)
Thursday, April 18, 2013
AGC demands apology from websites over verdict backlash
AGC demands apology from websites over verdict backlash
POSTED: 18 Apr 2013 6:15 PM
Singapore's Attorney-General Chambers (AGC) has issued a take-down letter and demanded an apology from several websites over posts which it said cast doubt on the judiciary's integrity.
SINGAPORE: The Attorney-General Chambers (AGC) has issued take-down letters and demanded apologies from several websites over posts which it said cast doubt on the judiciary's integrity in a case involving a China national.
The websites and Facebook pages involved had suggested that a Singapore court had been lenient to Yuan Zhenghua, 31, who hijacked a taxi last year and crashed it into the driveway of Changi Airport's budget terminal, killing a Malaysian airport worker.
Yuan, a technician, was sentenced by a district court to 25 months in jail Monday.
Singaporeans took to Internet websites and Facebook pages to criticise the verdict, prompting the AGC to issue letters asking for an apology and that the postings be taken down.
A spokesman for the AGC said the online comments and postings had accused the court of bias in favour of the China national.
"These comments include allegations that the courts did not wish to offend the People's Republic of China, that Singaporeans would get heavier sentences in comparison, that the judge lacked integrity, and that leniency was shown," the spokesman said.
"These and similar comments pose a real risk that public confidence in the administration of justice would be undermined."
The spokesman added that the online comments ignored the fact that the court took into account Yuan's "psychotic disorder" in its decision.
The AGC also stressed that editors, administrators and moderators of websites have the responsibility to ensure that comments and posts on their sites are not contemptuous.
While the AGC did not identify the websites involved, the administrators of Facebook page "EDMW loves Singapore" put up an apology for committing an "act of contempt of court" in its posts about Yuan and said it had taken them down.
The government says attacks on the judiciary will undermine public confidence in the institution.
In July last year, the AGC also sent a letter to prominent Singaporean blogger Alex Au after he alleged in a post that the city-state's courts are biased in favour of the well-connected.
In 2010, a Singapore court jailed British author Alan Shadrake for six weeks for publishing a book critical of the city-state's administration of the death penalty.
- AFP/CNA/jc
- wong chee tat :)
POSTED: 18 Apr 2013 6:15 PM
Singapore's Attorney-General Chambers (AGC) has issued a take-down letter and demanded an apology from several websites over posts which it said cast doubt on the judiciary's integrity.
SINGAPORE: The Attorney-General Chambers (AGC) has issued take-down letters and demanded apologies from several websites over posts which it said cast doubt on the judiciary's integrity in a case involving a China national.
The websites and Facebook pages involved had suggested that a Singapore court had been lenient to Yuan Zhenghua, 31, who hijacked a taxi last year and crashed it into the driveway of Changi Airport's budget terminal, killing a Malaysian airport worker.
Yuan, a technician, was sentenced by a district court to 25 months in jail Monday.
Singaporeans took to Internet websites and Facebook pages to criticise the verdict, prompting the AGC to issue letters asking for an apology and that the postings be taken down.
A spokesman for the AGC said the online comments and postings had accused the court of bias in favour of the China national.
"These comments include allegations that the courts did not wish to offend the People's Republic of China, that Singaporeans would get heavier sentences in comparison, that the judge lacked integrity, and that leniency was shown," the spokesman said.
"These and similar comments pose a real risk that public confidence in the administration of justice would be undermined."
The spokesman added that the online comments ignored the fact that the court took into account Yuan's "psychotic disorder" in its decision.
The AGC also stressed that editors, administrators and moderators of websites have the responsibility to ensure that comments and posts on their sites are not contemptuous.
While the AGC did not identify the websites involved, the administrators of Facebook page "EDMW loves Singapore" put up an apology for committing an "act of contempt of court" in its posts about Yuan and said it had taken them down.
The government says attacks on the judiciary will undermine public confidence in the institution.
In July last year, the AGC also sent a letter to prominent Singaporean blogger Alex Au after he alleged in a post that the city-state's courts are biased in favour of the well-connected.
In 2010, a Singapore court jailed British author Alan Shadrake for six weeks for publishing a book critical of the city-state's administration of the death penalty.
- AFP/CNA/jc
- wong chee tat :)
Monday, June 6, 2011
LinkedIn opens Asia office in Singapore
LinkedIn opens Asia office in Singapore
Posted: 31 May 2011 1628 hrs
SINGAPORE: Professional networking platform LinkedIn on Tuesday opened its regional headquarters in Singapore and plans to use the city-state as a base to expand its Asia-Pacific presence.
"We chose Singapore's location for a few reasons, one because its the regional hub for so many multinational companies, many of whom are already our customers on a global basis," regional managing director Arvind Rajan said at a media briefing.
"Part of the reason that we're moving out here is to also use Singapore as a hub through which we'll look at opportunities to expand physically throughout the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region," he added.
Singapore, with its business-friendly environment and choice geographical location, is popular as a regional base for multinational companies that want to expand into Asia's booming economies.
"From March of last year to March of this year, we grew 130 percent in APAC so we're seeing a really rapid growth already and we think that by having a presence here, by expanding our footprint in Asia, we think we'll see continued sustained growth," said Rajan.
The Singapore office will oversee sales, finance, marketing and human resource functions for the region and plans to expand into Japan later this year, he said.
The US-listed firm has more than 100 million members from 200 countries as of March 2011, with over 18 million of them from the region, a company factsheet showed.
LinkedIn is the second online networking site to set up shop in Singapore after Facebook inaugurated its Asian sales office last year.
It listed early this month on the New York Stock Exchange and is the first major US social-network firm to go public.
-AFP/ac
- wong chee tat :)
Posted: 31 May 2011 1628 hrs
SINGAPORE: Professional networking platform LinkedIn on Tuesday opened its regional headquarters in Singapore and plans to use the city-state as a base to expand its Asia-Pacific presence.
"We chose Singapore's location for a few reasons, one because its the regional hub for so many multinational companies, many of whom are already our customers on a global basis," regional managing director Arvind Rajan said at a media briefing.
"Part of the reason that we're moving out here is to also use Singapore as a hub through which we'll look at opportunities to expand physically throughout the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region," he added.
Singapore, with its business-friendly environment and choice geographical location, is popular as a regional base for multinational companies that want to expand into Asia's booming economies.
"From March of last year to March of this year, we grew 130 percent in APAC so we're seeing a really rapid growth already and we think that by having a presence here, by expanding our footprint in Asia, we think we'll see continued sustained growth," said Rajan.
The Singapore office will oversee sales, finance, marketing and human resource functions for the region and plans to expand into Japan later this year, he said.
The US-listed firm has more than 100 million members from 200 countries as of March 2011, with over 18 million of them from the region, a company factsheet showed.
LinkedIn is the second online networking site to set up shop in Singapore after Facebook inaugurated its Asian sales office last year.
It listed early this month on the New York Stock Exchange and is the first major US social-network firm to go public.
-AFP/ac
- wong chee tat :)
Friday, September 24, 2010
Facebook apologizes for worst outage in 4 years
Facebook apologizes for worst outage in 4 years
TAIPEI, 24 SEPTEMBER 2010 -
Many Facebook users were unable to access the social networking site for up to two and a half hours on Thursday, the worst outage the website has had in over four years, Facebook said in a posting.
The problems were traced back to a change made by Facebook in one of its systems.
The change was made to a piece of data that was called upon whenever an error-checking routine found invalid data in Facebook's system. The piece of data was itself interpreted as invalid, which caused the system to try and replace it with the same piece of data and so a feedback loop began.
The loop resulted in hundreds of thousands of queries per second being sent to Facebook's database cluster, overwhelming the system.
The result for users was a "DNS error" message and no access to the site.
"The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful - we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site," wrote Robert Johnson, director of software engineering at Facebook, in a post on the site. "Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site."
The problem hasn't been entirely fixed. Johnson said Facebook had to turn off the automated system to get the website back up and running. But that system does play an integral role in protecting the website.
Facebook is now exploring new ways to handle the situation so it won't lead to another feedback loop.
"We apologize again for the site outage, and we want you to know that we take the performance and reliability of Facebook very seriously," he wrote.
It's the second day Facebook was brought down for some users. On Wednesday, Facebook blamed a third-party networking provider for making the site inaccessible to some.
- wong chee tat :)
TAIPEI, 24 SEPTEMBER 2010 -
Many Facebook users were unable to access the social networking site for up to two and a half hours on Thursday, the worst outage the website has had in over four years, Facebook said in a posting.
The problems were traced back to a change made by Facebook in one of its systems.
The change was made to a piece of data that was called upon whenever an error-checking routine found invalid data in Facebook's system. The piece of data was itself interpreted as invalid, which caused the system to try and replace it with the same piece of data and so a feedback loop began.
The loop resulted in hundreds of thousands of queries per second being sent to Facebook's database cluster, overwhelming the system.
The result for users was a "DNS error" message and no access to the site.
"The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful - we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site," wrote Robert Johnson, director of software engineering at Facebook, in a post on the site. "Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site."
The problem hasn't been entirely fixed. Johnson said Facebook had to turn off the automated system to get the website back up and running. But that system does play an integral role in protecting the website.
Facebook is now exploring new ways to handle the situation so it won't lead to another feedback loop.
"We apologize again for the site outage, and we want you to know that we take the performance and reliability of Facebook very seriously," he wrote.
It's the second day Facebook was brought down for some users. On Wednesday, Facebook blamed a third-party networking provider for making the site inaccessible to some.
- wong chee tat :)
More Details on Today's Outage (Facebook)
by Robert Johnson on Friday, September 24, 2010 at 8:29am
Early
today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for
approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four
years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it. We also wanted
to provide much more technical detail on what happened and share one big
lesson learned.
The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.
The intent of the automated system is to check for configuration values that are invalid in the cache and replace them with updated values from the persistent store. This works well for a transient problem with the cache, but it doesn’t work when the persistent store is invalid.
Today we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second.
To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued. As long as the databases failed to service some of the requests, they were causing even more requests to themselves. We had entered a feedback loop that didn’t allow the databases to recover.
The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful - we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site. Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site.
This got the site back up and running today, and for now we’ve turned off the system that attempts to correct configuration values. We’re exploring new designs for this configuration system following design patterns of other systems at Facebook that deal more gracefully with feedback loops and transient spikes.
We apologize again for the site outage, and we want you to know that we take the performance and reliability of Facebook very seriously.
- wong chee tat :)
The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.
The intent of the automated system is to check for configuration values that are invalid in the cache and replace them with updated values from the persistent store. This works well for a transient problem with the cache, but it doesn’t work when the persistent store is invalid.
Today we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second.
To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued. As long as the databases failed to service some of the requests, they were causing even more requests to themselves. We had entered a feedback loop that didn’t allow the databases to recover.
The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful - we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site. Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site.
This got the site back up and running today, and for now we’ve turned off the system that attempts to correct configuration values. We’re exploring new designs for this configuration system following design patterns of other systems at Facebook that deal more gracefully with feedback loops and transient spikes.
We apologize again for the site outage, and we want you to know that we take the performance and reliability of Facebook very seriously.
- wong chee tat :)
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Facebook lower GPA!!! You sure????? :/
Study Finds Link Between Facebook Use, Lower Grades in College
April 13th, 2009 by Jeff Grabmeier Facebook
(PhysOrg.com) -- College students who use Facebook spend less time studying and have lower grade point averages than students who have not signed up for the social networking website, according to a pilot study at one university.
However, more than three-quarters of Facebook users claimed that their use of the social networking site didn't interfere with their studies.
"We can't say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying - but we did find a relationship there," said Aryn Karpinski, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in education at Ohio State University.
"There's a disconnect between students' claim that Facebook use doesn't impact their studies, and our finding showing they had lower grades and spent less time studying."
While this was a relatively small, exploratory study, it is one of the first to find a relationship between college students' use of Facebook and their academic achievement.
Typically, Facebook users in the study had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, while non-users had GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0.
In addition, users said they averaged one to five hours a week studying, while non-users studied 11 to 15 hours per week.
Karpinski conducted the study with Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican University. They presented their research April 16 in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association.
The researchers surveyed 219 students at Ohio State, including 102 undergraduate students and 117 graduate students. Of the participants, 148 said they had a Facebook account.
The study found that 85 percent of undergraduates were Facebook users, while only 52 percent of graduate students had accounts.
Students who spent more time working at paid jobs were less likely to use Facebook, while students who were more involved in extracurricular activities at school were more likely to use Facebook.
Science, technology, engineering, math (STEM) and business majors were more likely to use Facebook than were students majoring in the humanities and social sciences.
"Other research had indicated that STEM majors spend more time on the Internet than do other students, so that may be one reason why they are more likely to use Facebook," Karpinski said.
There were no differences in Facebook use between different members of racial and ethnic groups that were part of the study, or between men and women.
Younger and full-time students were more likely to be Facebook users.
Findings showed that 79 percent of Facebook users claimed it did not have an impact on their academic performance. In open-ended questions on the survey, users claimed they didn't use Facebook frequently enough to notice an impact, and emphasized that academics were a priority for them.
Karpinski emphasized that the results don't necessarily mean that Facebook use leads to lower grades.
"There may be other factors involved, such as personality traits, that link Facebook use and lower grades," she said.
"It may be that if it wasn't for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades. But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online."
Karpinski said it was significant that the link between lower grades and Facebook use was found even in graduate students. She said that graduate students generally have GPAs above 3.5, so the fact that even they had lower grades when they used Facebook -- and spent less time studying - was an amazing finding.
The popularity of Facebook is evident in college lecture halls, Karpinski said. Faculty members who allow students to use laptops in class have told her they often see students on the Facebook site during class.
"It's not going away anytime soon, and we need to learn more about how Facebook use is affecting students," she said.
As for herself, Karpinski said she doesn't have a Facebook account, although her co-author does.
"For me, I think Facebook is a huge distraction," she said.
Source: The Ohio State University (news : web)
Okay, time to get off blogging and news reading! Off to study!
- wong chee tat :)
April 13th, 2009 by Jeff Grabmeier Facebook
(PhysOrg.com) -- College students who use Facebook spend less time studying and have lower grade point averages than students who have not signed up for the social networking website, according to a pilot study at one university.
However, more than three-quarters of Facebook users claimed that their use of the social networking site didn't interfere with their studies.
"We can't say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying - but we did find a relationship there," said Aryn Karpinski, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in education at Ohio State University.
"There's a disconnect between students' claim that Facebook use doesn't impact their studies, and our finding showing they had lower grades and spent less time studying."
While this was a relatively small, exploratory study, it is one of the first to find a relationship between college students' use of Facebook and their academic achievement.
Typically, Facebook users in the study had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, while non-users had GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0.
In addition, users said they averaged one to five hours a week studying, while non-users studied 11 to 15 hours per week.
Karpinski conducted the study with Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican University. They presented their research April 16 in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association.
The researchers surveyed 219 students at Ohio State, including 102 undergraduate students and 117 graduate students. Of the participants, 148 said they had a Facebook account.
The study found that 85 percent of undergraduates were Facebook users, while only 52 percent of graduate students had accounts.
Students who spent more time working at paid jobs were less likely to use Facebook, while students who were more involved in extracurricular activities at school were more likely to use Facebook.
Science, technology, engineering, math (STEM) and business majors were more likely to use Facebook than were students majoring in the humanities and social sciences.
"Other research had indicated that STEM majors spend more time on the Internet than do other students, so that may be one reason why they are more likely to use Facebook," Karpinski said.
There were no differences in Facebook use between different members of racial and ethnic groups that were part of the study, or between men and women.
Younger and full-time students were more likely to be Facebook users.
Findings showed that 79 percent of Facebook users claimed it did not have an impact on their academic performance. In open-ended questions on the survey, users claimed they didn't use Facebook frequently enough to notice an impact, and emphasized that academics were a priority for them.
Karpinski emphasized that the results don't necessarily mean that Facebook use leads to lower grades.
"There may be other factors involved, such as personality traits, that link Facebook use and lower grades," she said.
"It may be that if it wasn't for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades. But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online."
Karpinski said it was significant that the link between lower grades and Facebook use was found even in graduate students. She said that graduate students generally have GPAs above 3.5, so the fact that even they had lower grades when they used Facebook -- and spent less time studying - was an amazing finding.
The popularity of Facebook is evident in college lecture halls, Karpinski said. Faculty members who allow students to use laptops in class have told her they often see students on the Facebook site during class.
"It's not going away anytime soon, and we need to learn more about how Facebook use is affecting students," she said.
As for herself, Karpinski said she doesn't have a Facebook account, although her co-author does.
"For me, I think Facebook is a huge distraction," she said.
Source: The Ohio State University (news : web)
Okay, time to get off blogging and news reading! Off to study!
- wong chee tat :)
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