While perhaps best known as a major social networking site in the Web 2.0 vein, Facebook is becoming a popular place to interface with potential customers, similar to what companies such as Scribe and iLike have done. Facebook also is being viewed as a place for enterprise collaboration, with Serena Software leveraging the site for this purpose. To get perspective on Facebook, InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Aditya Agarwal, Facebook director of engineering. Agarwal formerly worked in the Oracle server technologies division.

Agarwal oversees product design and development at Facebook and also is responsible for Facebook's search strategy. Agarwal discussed the company's intentions, search efforts, developer strategy, and infrastructure. He also commented on why the company has been gaining traction in the enterprise.

InfoWorld: It?s interesting that you worked at Oracle right before Facebook. And you went to Facebook three years ago when the company was not as in the news as it is now. Why would you leave an established software giant like Oracle to go to a startup like Facebook??

Agarwal: I think that at that stage it was clear that Facebook was a young startup with a lot of energy. It was something that had tremendous potential. And there is so much information out there. People put a lot of information online. They made it accessible, but over time really the [intent] is going to be to try to help people make the Web more social. And even then, about three years ago, it was apparent that that was the direction, the trend that the Web was moving in.

InfoWorld: You wanted to talk about search efforts. What exactly is happening there with Facebook? When I think of search, I think of Yahoo or Google or some of the others. I don?t necessarily think of Facebook.

Agarwal: The reason you use search in Facebook is that there is a lot of information that people are generating within the context of social networks. It becomes quite imperative that you have a way of being able to search that information. And I think that Facebook is taking the first crack at that. And the first crack that we really tackled was -- how do we let people find other people? And you are right in that the scope of this is different than from other Web search engines, but there is a value-add that you can provide when you think of search -- returning users' relevant results that are not based on traditional mechanisms. [For example], when you search for somebody named John, chances are that you are going to get your friends who are named John, your friends of friends who are named John. So [in the case of someone in Silicon Valley, the search might include people] from San Francisco, San Jose, Palo Alto who are named John. I think that we try to essentially provide value based on the unique position that we have. That?s the way that we approach search.

InfoWorld: So where are you headed with search??

Agarwal: Well, I think we are continuously innovating in the search space. One of the things that we have learned is that search is obviously something that requires a tremendous amount of infrastructure, and we?re in the process of scaling our systems out, building up new services and in the future obviously exposing more functionality to the user.

So to give you an example of something that was released very recently, we now allow users the ability to search through their entire inbox, the people inbox, the people?s messaging system. The important thing to note there is [that] that?s a pretty difficult problem in the sheer size, the scale of the data that we have. But the way that we view search today is that as Facebook becomes more and more [of a public] communications utility and people start using Facebook messages almost exclusively instead of something like e-mail, then we need to provide them with search capability there because it?s an important part of having a complete holistic experience.

InfoWorld: You also wanted to talk about Thrift, which is your software framework for cross-services development. Could you tell me what the intent of that is and what?s happening with that?

Agarwal: Thrift is a lightweight RPC framework that allows really high-performance, intra-datacenter communication. Another aspect of Thrift is [it] allows you to have cross-language communication. So you could be writing some functionality in PHP and by phone, and it seamlessly makes calls out to services that might be running in Java or C++. The key thing I think, or the key motivation behind building out Thrift and not using any of the existing frameworks, for example, something like CORBA or something like a REST services framework, is that Thrift is designed to be extremely high-performance. So when you?re looking at providing really a quick user experience, you?re thinking of response times, latencies in terms of 100 milliseconds, in terms of 150 milliseconds, and at that latency level, you have to have something that is much more [higher-performing] than anything out there that?s in the market right now. So we decided to develop this in-house and then basically release it as open source to the world. A lot of the functionality that allowed us to innovate quickly, we also wanted to expose to everybody else because part of our vision is to provide a platform but also provide the tools that people can use to help scale their services.

InfoWorld: What type of services are people building for Facebook using Thrift?

Agarwal: That's a good question, and a lot of our core services like search, you?ve seen chat, our advertising systems, some of our mobile systems. There are a lot of services that are built on top of Thrift, and they?re built in a variety of different languages. We have services running in C++, we have services running in Java, Python, Erlang.

The best part about Thrift is that you can choose to use the tool that you want, the language that you want, the framework that you want to best solve your problem. You?re not constrained by a standard three-tier architecture, you?re not constrained by only being able to use one application language. We really believe in giving our engineering organization the best tools to solve problems, and Thrift is a key part of that because it allows you to concentrate on creating the product that you want, solving the problem that you?re trying to tackle and not have to worry about -- how do I go in between languages? How do I efficiently transmit data between one project and another?

InfoWorld: Facebook is generally viewed as a platform for social networking in a nonbusiness sense, but I know that?s changing. What exactly does Facebook have to offer enterprises?

Agarwal: Without getting into the actual specifics of that question, I think that the way I think about that is that we strive to provide a platform that can enable many different types of applications. And our focus is really on having a platform that [is] fully feature-complete enough to allow people to build different kinds of things on top of it.

InfoWorld: And what type of enterprise capabilities are people building on top of Facebook?

Agarwal: I don?t have that data off the top of my head, which is about the enterprise capability that applications are providing, but I?d be happy to put you in touch with somebody from our platform product marketing team, who could maybe provide a more accurate answer to that.

InfoWorld: Slide, a personal media network, has used Facebook as a Web vehicle. iLike discovery service has used Facebook for a music discovery service. Is Facebook surprised by businesses that are using Facebook to grow their businesses?

Agarwal: I?m not entirely surprised because I think that Facebook has -- it?s such an important and useful communications utility -- but more than that, it also has an incredible amount of distribution. Like the distribution engine in the form of [Facebook] News Feed and all of the different other platform integration points that we offer. It?s pretty compelling in terms of having a vehicle to kick-start the growth of a particular service or an application, which I guess which is just simply not provided in Web 1.0.

InfoWorld: You?ve sort of mentioned this with Thrift, but what type of developer services does Facebook offer?

Agarwal: If you?re a Facebook platform application developer, then obviously we have a number of client libraries. And the approach that we have taken is that we support some of the client libraries internally, but by and large, we let the developer community contribute client libraries in different languages because we feel that they are in a better position to maintain and optimize those particular client libraries. We have a suite of open source software, also, that we are happy to share with developers, Thrift being the major one there. We are going to be releasing a new open source software package called Scribe, which is a distributed logging framework that we use extensively in-house. We thought that we would give that back to the community as well. And a lot of the other open source projects that we work on that are not -- that were not created by us but we have contributed heavily to, such as memcached and obviously Apache, MySQL, and so on.

InfoWorld: Does Facebook have any plans to participate in Google?s OpenSocial Initiative? I know you?ve been a hold-out on that.

Agarwal: Actually, once again, I think that somebody from the platform product marketing team would probably be the best person to answer that.

InfoWorld: I heard a presentation last week about Enterprise 2.0 and enterprise social networking. During the presentation, a Serena Software representative said the company is using Facebook as its collaboration platform. Is that something that?s pretty widespread? Do you expect it to grow? And once again, is that something that Facebook would have expected three years ago?

Agarwal: It doesn?t surprise me because, once again, a lot of our internal world view and how we approach the products that we build is that we want to be enablers for external applications, but also we are [a] communications utility. We are facilitating interactions between people. And for me, when you talk about enterprise collaboration software, that is one aspect of that. And what we build should allow developers and users alike to benefit in terms of building applications that provide that functionality and for users to actually be able to utilize that particular functionality.

InfoWorld: How do you respond to criticism that the Facebook platform is a closed platform?

Agarwal: I will take an initial stab at answering the question, but I?m going to have to defer to the platform product marketing team. I think that I don?t view it as a closed system. I actually view it as an enabler in the sense that we are enabling the ability for external Web sites and the application that you earlier mentioned to provide a compelling user experience in the form of new functionality. So I?m not quite sure I would view it as a closed platform.

InfoWorld: What can you say about the infrastructure at Facebook? What powers Facebook?

Agarwal: I?d be happy to talk about that. We have two different kinds of code stacks, and I think I described one earlier, which is primarily running on Thrift and some other kind of core component that we have. The other part of our stack is something you mentioned briefly in your question, which is a kind of a LAMP stack, obviously running a Linux kernel. We modify that to be more optimized for our purposes, and then after that we are running the Apache Web server, we?re running PHP, and we?re running memcached, which is a distributed in-memory hash table. And we have 25TB of in-memory cache, which is kind of where more than 95 percent of our data access comes from. And we have MySQL, which is a persistence store on the back end, and we obviously dabble heavily in each of the underlying technologies to make them more efficient, make them more [higher performing] and basically help in scaling

InfoWorld: Are you using mostly open source software to power Facebook?

Agarwal: Most of our systems are running open source.

InfoWorld: Have you found Linux adequate for what you?re doing?

Agarwal: Yes, absolutely. In fact, Linux is more than adequate for the kind of things that we?ve been doing, and as we roll out new features and new products and we see certain parts of Linux that don?t work as well, then our first [reaction will be], OK, how can we fix it and give this back to the Linux community such that everybody might benefit from it?

InfoWorld: How many servers do you use?

Agarwal: We have more than 10,000 servers.

InfoWorld: All Intel servers?

Agarwal: I?m not aware of the hardware specifications, but we have more than 10,000 servers.

InfoWorld: I have nephews that are using MySpace. I don?t know if they?re using Facebook. What would you say the main difference between MySpace and Facebook would be, for somebody like myself who doesn?t get the time to hang out in some of these social network sites?

Agarwal: I think it?s a good question and if you are doing a direct comparison, I want to stress our core values. We are creating products that help people communicate better, help people share information, and essentially create trusted relationships [on] the Internet. And have a way of expressing themselves efficiently. We also want to create a platform that lets others create compelling functionality based on the social graph and some of the core services that we provide.

InfoWorld: Are any announcements coming up from Facebook in the next few weeks or months??

Agarwal: Well, we are having our developer?s conference on July 23. It?s in San Francisco. It?s a developer?s conference, so obviously we?ll be talking a little bit about the platform and so on.?

InfoWorld: Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about?

Agarwal: I think the major thing I?ll stress is some of my philosophy within engineering, I?ve thought a little bit about this earlier in the interview, but what I?m really trying to stress is that we want to create tools, we want to create components, we want to create stand-alone items that allow developers, both internally and externally, to create products. And not just create products, but create them as quickly as possible. So you want to allow them to focus on the functionality they want to provide, on the end-user product, like -- what benefits are you providing to the user? And so a lot of our development philosophy is really centered around providing people with the tools to be great at what they do. And you know, Thrift, Scribe, and a lot of the other open source initiatives that we take part in, have [an] underlying philosophy.

Not all of this week's news involved global financial turmoil: while IT budgets are being cut and AMD is breaking itself up, a security tool was released for Firefox that prevents "clickjacking" and Microsoft said that Windows 7 will fix issues in Vista's user account control feature.

1. Economic malaise hits IT industry : Disappointing earnings from some IT companies, fewer initial public offerings, lowered earnings forecasts -- all are part of the grim global economic outlook. On the bright side, though, IBM reported this week that its net income rose 20 percent in its third quarter and maintained its profits will be strong for the full fiscal year.

[ Video: Catch up on the latest tech news with the World Tech Update ]

2. AMD to spin off chip fabs to raise funds : Advanced Micro Devices is splitting into two companies, with one designing chips and the other making them. The company also said that two investment funds owned by the Abu Dhabi government will provide capital to AMD and help it compete better with Intel. The news was hailed by analysts, investors, customers and employees as a way to strengthen AMD, particularly in the harsh economic climate.

[ Related: Rival Intel has launched an investigation into AMD's spinoff plans | Intel may be worried because analysts think the split could help AMD make up market share quickly ]

3. Firefox extension blocks dangerous Web attack : An update of a free security tool for Firefox blocks "clickjacking," one of the most dangerous and vexing problems on the Internet. Clickjacking happens when a Web user clicks on an invisible, malicious link without knowing it. The tool, called NoScript, now includes ClearClick, which can tell if a Web page contains a hidden, embedded element. Users of NoScript who click on such links will be asked if they really want to do that.

4. Microsoft to improve Vista's problematic UAC in Windows 7 : Microsoft is tweaking the user account control feature in its Windows client OS and admits that what was meant to be a security feature in Vista has been a hassle for users. The idea behind UAC in Vista is to give primary PC users more control of applications and settings, but it hasn't quite worked out that way. "What we've learned is that we only got part of the way there in Vista and some folks think we accomplished the opposite," said a blog post attributed to Ben Fathi, Microsoft corporate vice president of development in the Windows Core Operating System Division.

5. Microsoft elaborates on Oslo : Microsoft shed some more light on its Oslo vision for model-based software development this week, detailing the "M" declarative modeling language and the Domain Specific Languages concept that are integral to the overall Oslo package. The company also offered reassurances to developers thattheir role is not being minimized by this raising of the level of abstraction.

6. Apple to hold special notebook event on Oct. 14 : Apple sent out an invitation to reporters to attend an event next Tuesday, saying that "the spotlight turns to notebooks." We assume this means that new Macbooks will be out in time for the all-important holiday shopping season.

7. For a promising IT career, go east, young techie : The IT job market had tightened up even before global financial turmoil gave us all a whack, but opportunities are more plentiful in China, India and Russia, according to analysis of growth trends. Working in such countries also can be good for the old resume. "IT is going global. The IT profession is going global. Developing product for markets all over the world is something you have to learn how to do. Overseas work is a huge enhancer for IT professionals," said Rob McGovern, CEO of JobFox, an international IT employment agency.

8. Mono 2.0 lets .Net apps run on Linux: Considered a major upgrade, the open-source Mono 2.0 runtime leverages Microsoft's .Net Framework 2.0 programming model, letting developers build desktop and server applications using Microsoft-based environments and deploy them across multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. By bringing apps beyond Windows, Mono will help developers reach a larger audience.

9. 11 Microsoft security updates due next week : There will be no rest for weary systems administrators next week -- Microsoft expects to roll out 11 security updates, with four of them rated critical. The monthly patchathon will apply to bugs in Windows Active Directory, Internet Explorer, Excel and the Microsoft Host Integration Server. Besides the critical patches, six others will be rated important and one will be moderate.

10. NASA: Messenger sends back never-before-seen Mercury images : NASA's Messenger spacecraft transmitted images of Mercury to scientist this week, proving them with data about parts of that planet that have never been seen before. The Mariner 10 mission in the 1970s identified the Kuiper crater on Mercury, the planet nearest the sun, and an image of the crater was among the first to be relayed to NASA. Messenger took hundreds of photos of Mercury as it got within 125 miles (201 kilometers) of the planet's surface.

A new Forrester Research study that polled more than 200 SAP customers found widespread discontent over the vendor's recent decision to shift customers to a pricier Enterprise Support offering, and also provides tips on how customers can mitigate the increased cost.

SAP announced in July that Enterprise Support would replace its basic and premium support options. Enterprise Support costs 22 percent of a customer's license fees, compared to 17 percent for basic support. The additional costs will be phased in over the next few years, and new charges won't begin until Jan. 1.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

But Forrester clients voiced a number of common gripes.

Eighty-five percent of the clients interviewed described minimal utilization of the Basic Support offering. "The average customer claims to connect with SAP fewer than six times a year -- the equivalent of buying a comprehensive but expensive insurance policy and rarely utilizing it," the report states.

Customers also complained to Forrester about the time it takes SAP to meet requests for new features.

"Customers believe that the maintenance dollars paid to SAP should go to filling in key functionality gaps in the software. However, there are a plethora of examples where key functionality requested two to four years ago by multiple customers in the same or different industries were not delivered in SAP R/3 4.7, let alone available in SAP ERP 6.0," the report states.

Clients "want to know how much of their support dollars really go back into reinvestment versus profit margins," it adds.

SAP has cited a number of reasons for its decision, such as greater complexity in customer environments, and argues that Enterprise Support provides a higher level of benefits for customers -- points the Forrester report does not dispute.

To mitigate the increased cost of maintenance, customers should seek steeper discounts on licensing deals, according to Forrester.

Another tactic would be to create a long-term "SAP containment strategy," which could include taking a look at other vendors. "Many SAP clients with whom we spoke have begun the process of evaluating Oracle Siebel, Salesforce.com and others for customer relationship management as well as Siperian, Initiate Systems and IBM for master data management."

Customers also should consider third-party options for support. While one company, Rimini Street, has announced plans to provide such support, it has not yet begun doing so, and even when it does will focus on only SAP's R/3 products.

The Forrester report's results stand in contrast to SAP's past contention that while customers may not like to pay more money, they understand the value of the new service.

An SAP spokesman was given a copy of the report on Friday, but did not immediately provide comment on its findings.

The collective sigh of relief when Apple lifted the iPhone NDA, which had prevented developers from discussing iPhone programming, came not just from developers, but also from educators, authors, and publishers. With the NDA gone, iPhone-related books can be published, and conferences can be much more detailed, leading to better education.

Publishers and authors who had books written were forced to shelve them because publishing the material would have broken the guidelines of the NDA. However, with the NDA removed, users can expect to see an abundance of information hitting the market, targeting everyone from developers to end-users.

[ Special report: IT's guide to the iPhone ]

"It was huge having the NDA lifted," said Bill Dudney, trainer and co-author of the upcoming book "iPhone SDK Development" (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2008).

Like many other authors, Dudney had a book written about the iPhone, but couldn't publish the book without breaking the NDA. Now, Dudney -- along with countless others -- can bring his product to market. (A quick search for  iPhone books on Amazon.com shows a number of titles available for pre-order.)

An abundance of books on the market isn't the only benefit we can expect to see. Conferences will now feature better sessions because speakers and trainers will be able to speak freely about what it takes to make a good iPhone application.

iPhoneDevCamp organizer and co-chair of O'Reilly's iPhoneLive conference, Raven Zachary said he is excited about what this means for future conferences. Zachary said they have tentatively added an introduction to iPhone development session at the upcoming conference, which is something they couldn't have done before Apple lifted the NDA.

In previous conferences, speakers would have to talk about Mac development tools and try to relate them to the iPhone, without speaking about the iPhone -- a tough task.

The NDA stifled growth in the development community simply because new developers had a limited amount of resources to seek help. Now, Dudney said, trainers can speak freely and actually help attendees with questions they have about developing for the iPhone. With new developers come new applications and innovation, which only helps the platform.

Perhaps not coincidentally, a week after lifting the NDA, Apple announced the iPhone Tech Talk World Tour, a series of free tech talks about the iPhone for developers. Topics include an introduction to Objective-C and Cocoa Touch, how to integrate the iPhone into an IT environment, submitting your app to the App Store, and iPhone game development

The end result for iPhone users should be a better choice of applications as developers continue to push the envelope of innovation.

MSI is continuing its assault on the Eee PC by launching the Wind U120.

[ For more on products in the hot mini-notebook category, check out our hands-on looks at Asus' Eee PC 901 and 1000, the Cloudbook Max netbook, Elitegroup's G10IL mini-laptop, MSI's Wind low-cost laptop, Giga-byte's M912X mini-laptop, HP's Mini-Note netbook, and Acer's Aspire one. ]

The U120 will feature similar specs to its predecessor, the Wind U100, which is powered by an Intel Atom processor. Customers will be able to choose between a 120GB hard-disk drive or a 40GB solid-state drive. The U120 also includes 802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity and a built-in 3G modem.

It is expected to be priced around £350 ($595) and available by December.

Shedding more light on its Oslo vision for model-based software development, Microsoft this week elaborated on plans to preview Oslo technologies, offering code names and citing the company's DSL (Domain Specific Languages) concept as a lynchpin of the platform.

A Community Technology Preview of Oslo is due at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles on October 27. Featured in the CTP will be a declarative modeling language now being identified by the code name "M," as well as software modeling tool code-named "Quadrant.

A repository for integration between models also will be part of the CTP. User feedback on the CTP will help determine the overall road map for Oslo technologies, said Robert Wahbe, Microsoft corporate vice president of the company's Connected Systems Division, during an interview this week.

With Oslo, Microsoft seeks to provide another layer of abstraction for developers and make development easier; models become the applications. Business analysts also could make changes to models. For example, an analyst could change an application that requires two managers' approvals for lunch expenses exceeding $100 to requiring these approvals for a $50 lunch, Wahbe said.?

"It's easier in many cases to look at a model and see what it's trying to do rather than look at hundreds of thousands of lines of code," Wahbe said.

With the M language, ISVs and developers could build textual DSLs, he said. A DSL enables a developer to write down intent in a way that is close to how a developer is thinking about a problem, Wahbe said. M also can be used to build data models.

"The idea of DSLs has been around. What we're trying to do with Oslo is make it easier for mainstream developers to use models in general," Wahbe said. Microsoft, as an ISV itself, will use DSLs for building domains for activities like workflow and databases.

"[The] notion is that M is excellent at building these DSLs in an easy way," Wahbe said. "In turn, once you have that DSL, what it does is it lets you produce something that the platform can execute directly."

A model is translated to XAML, which can be executed by the platform. Oslo also can work with multiple runtimes from platforms like Java if developers customize the Oslo tools.

Quadrant, meanwhile, provides a way to author models visually. "The way to think about it is M lets you build textual DSLs and Quadrant lets you build visual DSLs," Wahbe said.

Oslo will be featured as part of the Visual Studio product family; the company has not yet announced which version would include Oslo. While Oslo at first glance might appear to be minimizing the role of the developer by raising the level of abstraction, Microsoft believes it is just a natural step in the evolution of software development that does not put developers' jobs at risk, Wahbe said.

"Developers can deliver higher-quality applications faster," he said.

With Oslo, Microsoft has "definitely raised the bar," said analyst Nick Gall, vice president of the enterprise architecture team at Gartner.

"The Oslo approach to modeling is a refreshing new approach. That said, it is ambitious," Gall said.

"Any attempt to do really do model-driven architecture is ambitious. We've been trying to do executable models for 25-plus years, and all to date have failed," such as with CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) and Object Modeling Group efforts, said Gall.

Microsoft is attacking the two core issues of modeling: translating from models into executable code and the functional aspect of an application, in which functional models must accommodate nonfunctional aspects of an application such as security and systems management, Gall said. Microsoft has not yet completed the integration with nonfunctional models, he said.

Oslo integrates with existing applications, according to Microsoft. It brings together a connected view of models and builds on existing investments on top of the Microsoft platform. Microsoft also is working with ISVs on solutions built using Oslo, including line-of-business applications and DSLs, the company said.