Mark Zuckerberg's Big 'Open Compute' Speech: A Live Blog
Is he going to announce a Skype partnership?
.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is giving a speech at the company's headquarters today where he's expected to announce a video partnership with Skype. We'll have longer takes as the day goes on, but here's what happening in real-time, along with streaming video.
1:38 p.m. It almost felt like the chat overhaul took a backseat to news about Facebook's news servers. Again, Adam Clark Estes was kind enough to ping us with this explanation: "The message that the servers and stuff sends is that Facebook is an innovator, an engineer's company. It's an interesting squeeze into the hardware business for Facebook, but also sounds like a rally cry for app developers to use Facebook--sounds like these serves will have capabilities that other won't."
1:35 p.m. For those who like milestones: Zuckerberg confirms the site has hit 750 million users.
1:29 p.m. Phillip Su is the "engineer on the video calling team" who scooped Zuckerberg on the Facebook blog. Since his post is still up, here's what he had to say about the origins of Skype partnership: "So a few months ago, we started working with Skype to bring video calling to Facebook. We built it right into chat, so all your conversations start from the same place. To call your friend, just click the video call button at the top of your chat window."
1:23 p.m. It looks like Zuck has been scooped by his own site now that the afternoon's big reveal is already up on Facebook--and the Skype partnership will be taking place! Other improvements include multi-person chats, a new chat design that "includes a sidebar that lists the people you message most" and video chat
1:18 p.m. Well, this certainly doesn't feel like the kind of event where you announce a partnership with Skype. Very tech-oriented, with lots of discussions of fans in the Facebook server rooms. Liveblogging at the Wall Street Journal Shayndi Rice speculates about what else it could be. "Other possible announcements" she lists include "A new iPad app. Actually, Facebook's first official iPad app. And we may get some news on the photo-sharing app first reported by TechCrunch a couple weeks ago...After Skype integration, the big question is whether Facebook will drop any news about Project Spartan, its rumored HTML-5 mobile platform." So so far it looks like we're one-for-three.
1:11 p.m."We believe in giving back--that's what inspired us to creating the Facebook open compute project." That's also why they're sharing all their design schematics. Radical transparency!
1:03 p.m. The Atlantic Wire's own Adam Clark Estes is telling us "open compute" is "the Spartan project that leaked a while ago, a Facebook app store."
1:02 p.m. Zuckerberg's very proud of all the things that happen in real-time on Facebook now.
1:01 p.m. Whatever this is, It's called the "open compute project."