The thing about design is it's so much easier to design a simple minimalist thing vs a feature rich mammoth site that has hundreds of function. FB succeeds at the latter fairly well. Sure it's not perfect, but they have done and continue to do a great job with it. Remember, Facebook has a huge, actively-engaged userbase, so the design is tailored largely for the experienced user, not the beginner.
Technology-wise the nature of the problem is the impressive thing. They have hundreds of millions of users visiting the site daily, each one seeing a completely customized page view on every load. There's no low-hanging fruit caching wise. What Google does for search or Amazon does for product pages is of negligible benefit. They were essentially the first company to tackle this type of problem successfully. Remember, Friendster failed because of this. MySpace pages loaded at half the speed despite doing only 10% as much. Facebook innovated at every level of the service. Just look at BigPipe (http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/bigpipe-p...) as an example of how they optimize the page loading experience itself for minimal perceived latency (then load Facebook and observe how fast it feels).
Considering the scale of the problem, you're right--it's impressively responsive. But I'd still hesitate to call it fast--on almost every visit, I'll have pictures that won't load, "like" tooltips that perpetually display "Loading..." instead of "John Doe liked this", newsfeed loading problems, etcetera. It could definitely be much faster.
Maybe you have latency to their data centers? For me (in Mountain View) it's hard to imagine it being any faster. The page appears within 200ms and all the boxes are completely filled in including images on my main page probably in under a second.
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The thing about design is it's so much easier to design a simple minimalist thing vs a feature rich mammoth site that has hundreds of function. FB succeeds at the latter fairly well. Sure it's not perfect, but they have done and continue to do a great job with it. Remember, Facebook has a huge, actively-engaged userbase, so the design is tailored largely for the experienced user, not the beginner.
Technology-wise the nature of the problem is the impressive thing. They have hundreds of millions of users visiting the site daily, each one seeing a completely customized page view on every load. There's no low-hanging fruit caching wise. What Google does for search or Amazon does for product pages is of negligible benefit. They were essentially the first company to tackle this type of problem successfully. Remember, Friendster failed because of this. MySpace pages loaded at half the speed despite doing only 10% as much. Facebook innovated at every level of the service. Just look at BigPipe (http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/bigpipe-p...) as an example of how they optimize the page loading experience itself for minimal perceived latency (then load Facebook and observe how fast it feels).
>then load Facebook and observe how fast it feels
Considering the scale of the problem, you're right--it's impressively responsive. But I'd still hesitate to call it fast--on almost every visit, I'll have pictures that won't load, "like" tooltips that perpetually display "Loading..." instead of "John Doe liked this", newsfeed loading problems, etcetera. It could definitely be much faster.
Maybe you have latency to their data centers? For me (in Mountain View) it's hard to imagine it being any faster. The page appears within 200ms and all the boxes are completely filled in including images on my main page probably in under a second.