Dave Fetterman did a fantastic job explaining the architecture of Facebook. Even for a Faceboot-ignorant person like me, after reading through the chapter I have now a fairly good understanding of its architecture. The diagrams throughout the chapter are very useful, they really help the readers to picture the overall design.
A couple of years ago I got a chance to sit alongside the CTO of a networking gear at a banquet. One thing I asked was regarding Content vs Delivery. He firmly told me that money was definitely at Disney not Comcast. The content is what the end users care for and thus the delivery model has to be content-centric. The equivalent comparison at the web is Data vs. Website Technology; thus the model needs to be data-centric.
The genius of Web 2.0 is to have it users voluntarily contribute data that are interesting to the groups. The company no longer needs to worry about the content, instead it can focus on the delivery. On top of that, Facebook is clever to eliminate the need of each individual sites to create its own social network; instead they get to rely on the networks at Facebook and even present their own content at the site. In return, Facebook becomes the hub of these web destinations.
A large portion of the chapter focuses on FQL and FBML. It is a good architectural decision to leverage the proven technologies instead of creating new ones from scratch. I originally had some concerns on the inappropriate intimacy caused by FQL - the needs of the other websites o know the Facebook-internal table formats, however these can just be logical views and thus do not need to reflect the actual implementation. So it should turn out to be OK.
As I said, I am not yet a Facebook-user and so I do not know the actual implementation and interface. However, I do get from the chapter that security is definitely an important consideration. Even though, I still have doubts on exposing data to the third-party. For example, it seems that an user can agree to export the email addresses of his or her friends to a third-party website. Do the friends have a say on this? In addition, what prevent the third-party from caching this info and either use it or sell it to others for other purposes? What's more, how can an user ensure that the third-party will remove the data once he revokes the permission on data export?
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