Facebook Chat

Found at Yariv's Blog: Facebook Chat is an article about the technology behind the Facebook social network.

They have a large web application with up to 70 Million users and want to provide them with presence information (like: "I am online", "I am busy", "I am away", "I am offline").

As the bidirectional information channel between the user's web browser and the Facebook servers they use BOSH, the XMPP way of binding XMPP via HTTP requests. The requests for BOSH are handled by a web server implemented in Erlang.

Mark Chu-Caroll starts series of Erlang tutorials

Erlang: A Language for Functional Concurrency is the first of a series of tutorials by Mark C. Chu-Carroll.

According to his profile Mark is a computer science PhD, so I hope for critical, reflected reviews and not more of those me-too-hype articles, which clutter the Erlang blogosphere.

He also seems to work for Google. This means he probably could find out what backend technology is used for Google Talk (Google's instant messaging service) and why. Within the XMPP community many folks wonder, why Google stopped using ejabberd, the XMPP server written in Erlang. At least that is the saying. We outside Google don't know for sure.

On the other hand, dissecting ejabberd, the present Erlang killer application, would be fun too. It just turned 5 years old, and many wait for the new ejabberd2 release, as the codebase shows it age.

Go Mark, Go! :-)