Open house.

Tonight I attended a lecture on Facebook development hosted by my company, Molecular at MIT. The lecture was held in the incredible Stata Center, designed by the architect Frank Ghery. I had driven past the striking building a few times and was keen to explore inside. Upon entering the juxtaposition of dynamic lines, curves and various textures, I wasn’t dissapointed. What an incredible space to learn. To socialise. To listen. To watch. If only all places of learning were this aesthetically pleasing and well equipped. Although I am not a developer and I have only a certain degree of interest in code, I found some of the lectures interesting. Particularly the introduction from Sandra Lui Huang from the Facebook development platform. She reported a few startling figures about the ever-growing social network phenomenon:

• There are currently more than 61 million active users.
• An average of 250,000 new registrations per day since January 2007.  
• Active users will double every 6 months.

This information is incredible, and reinforces the current trends in how people spend time online. As a Facebook user myself, I find the data easy to believe, practically everyone I went to school with is on it, even friends of mine I know rarely use a computer. The key to this increase in users is the ability for third party development of applications. These third party widgets are extremely popular and include games and applications like flickr photo browsing. Whilst I am not a subscriber to most of these applications (I find some of them quite annoying) I do find value in those that enable me to share pictures and images with my network.