Facebook Is Radically Changing How The Tech World Works Behind-The-Scenes

It takes a lot of technical chops to run an operation the size of Facebook.

Some 618 million people use Facebook every day and they use it to play games, post news and photos. Consider this: Facebook currently stores more than 240 billion photos.

All told, Facebook will spend $1.8 billion in 2013 on its IT needs mostly on servers, data centers, and infrastructure, it said.

A lot of what Facebook needs to operate its massive web site has never been done before, so It has to invent its own technology. And then Facebook often simply gives away the tech it creates, as open source projects.

Facebook benefits by sharing its tech freely like that. Other companies use it, improve it and share back. Sometimes Facebook doesn't invent a technology, but adopts another open source project and then becomes a major force working on it.

Through all of this behind-the-scenes work, Facebook is slowly, and radically, changing the entire tech scene.