How long is FB keeping all of this data? As long as the user doesn’t delete it? Heck, I have no plans to delete anything off my FB profile, yet at least 50% of it is worthless to me. I don’t delete it because I don’t think to delete it. So they risk becoming a data dump, and have to pay to store the data that has no value to anyone.

Ten years from now, will all this useless data still be sitting on spinning disks? Out in the ocean in one of Google’s wave-powered data centers?

Glad FB is investing in new technologies to keep up, but seems to me the approach is a lot like adding lanes to the freeway. At what point will we have to change the behavior, not just the infrastructure? I *know* FB doesn’t want to change the behavior quite yet, but storage isn’t free. This story is far from over. Will be interesting to watch.

Los Alamos scientists had developed the current FBI’s Finger-print Image database is using wavelet (compression, archival & retrieval).

One of the top expert’s/researcher’s in wavelet today is Prof. Dave Donoho. They have developed an open source wavelet package called Wavelab (written in matlab) which is freely available for download from his research group’s website, so perhaps FB engineers could tap David & his group’s expertise to either consult to Facebook or fund the Wavelab team to develop a wavelet-based archival/retrieval system for Facebook. FB has millions of dollars of funding and I am sure that the expertise that the WaveLab team from Stanford can offer FB is something worth paying for, because it is a fact that facebook’s image repository will keep growing over time.

I just spent a couple minutes looking through how Basecamp does this, and sure enough, they’re doing much better than Facebook. Using S3, they generate a random URL like FB, but also use a timeout that makes the image publicly available for only a couple minutes or so.

It looks to me that Facebook has taken a shortcut here with privacy settings, which is, um, kind of their hole shtick.

I’d be more than happy to learn I’ve got some crucial detail wrong here…

Put another way, if I post a private photo, Facebook will deliver that photo to anyone on the internet who knows the URL.

Is this simply the industry standard for privacy controls? It seems to me quite weak: essentially security through obscurity.

I’d also be curious to know if this is a new function of the “heystack” design.

‘Disc’ is different from ‘disk’ and it’s the latter you’re referring to.

I have been screaming since!

Back on topic, that’s pretty amazing that three engineers could churn that out. With the booming popularity and, by extension, the amount of media they’ll be uploading they probably needed to do something to increase efficiency ASAP.

Um, that’s 3 names.