It seems that almost every major feature on Facebook started as a hackathon project.
Hackathons are all-night coding sessions where engineers get amped up on caffeine, brainstorm ideas, and build anything they want.
There's just one rule for a Facebook hackathon: You can't work on the same thing that you work on during the day.
Facebook engineering manager Pedram Keyani is often mentioned as the guy who made hackathons a tradition at Facebook. The first official hackathon took place in 2007 after Keyani emailed his fellow colleagues to see if anyone would be interested in hacking with him the following night.
That hackathon, Keyani says, generated a lot of great projects and ideas. So the next day, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg approached him saying how awesome it was. From that point on, Keyani made an effort to ask people every six to eight weeks if they wanted to hack.
As Ryan Tate documented in "The 20% Doctrine," a book about hackathons and other forms of in-house innovation, these hackathons developed an idea for "hack days" pioneered at Yahoo by Chad Dickerson, who's now the CEO of Etsy. But Facebook married the idea to the college all-nighter and came up with a formula that's now part of startup culture throughout Silicon Valley.
Where Facebook has proved especially strong in its implementation of the idea is turning hackathon work into reality.
Facebook's "Mail a Postcard" feature is cool but it's still in its testing phase
Facebook started testing a new "Mail a Postcard" feature in August 2012 to let users send any of their own photos as physical postcards to friends.
is still in its testing phase, but the company rolled it out to a select number of users in August 2012.
We still have yet to see the Mail a Postcard feature make its way to the masses.
Facebook Chat is probably one of the best hackathon projects turned real
Facebook Chat launched back in 2008 to offer a way for users to communicate with their friends, other than via their Wall (now called Timeline) or Inbox.
Chat has gone through a few iterations since its early days, but it still provides the same service: real-time communication with friends.
Facebook's app for users without smartphones added Instagram-like filters in May 2012 all thanks to one engineer who came up with the idea at a hackathon
Facebook's feature phone app, dubbed Facebook For Every Phone, launched back in 2011.
Facebook announced plans to acquire Instagram just one month before this feature's release, but the deal didn't close. Today, Instagram remains an app for smartphone users—so this photo-filter feature helps bring special effects to the large number of Facebook users who aren't on iPhone or Android.
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