How Facebook Has Changed Computing

Over the past 15 years, Facebook has changed the way we keep in touch with friends, how we feud with family members, how we think about privacy, and how we consume Russian propaganda---not always for the better. "Facebook has been a driving force in open source for years, sharing many critical pieces of technology with the broader community," says Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation. The Birth of Big Data One of Facebook's first big contributions to the larger computing community was Cassandra, a database system that can scale across hundreds or thousands of servers. "Facebook has been a driving force in open source for years, sharing many critical pieces of technology with the broader community." Jim Zemlin, executive director, Linux Foundation "They went beyond just cloning what Google and Amazon did and innovate, they did something different," says Jonathan Ellis, who used Cassandra extensively as a Rackspace employee and went on to co-found DataStax, a company that supports Cassandra for corporate clients, in 2010.