Some Of Facebook's Best Features Were Once Hackathon Projects

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 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.

Before one of Facebook's hackathons in 2012, a few engineers created a Facebook group called "Social Calendar Dreamers" to brainstorm ways to make the Events experience more visual. What came from it was a new list view and calendar view to easily digest upcoming birthdays, invites, and suggested events.

"It was awesome to watch this project come together so quickly," Facebook engineer Bob Baldwin wrote on the company blog. "The great thing about hackathons is that you get to dive straight into building a concept with your friends without having any concrete plans or directives."

Timeline started as a hackathon project in late 2010 with a team of two full-time engineers, an engineering intern, and a designer. 

It took the four of them one night to build a working demo. But things really kicked into high gear in 2011 when they added more people to the team. In the end, it only took the team six months to create the Timeline.

"In retrospect, that’s pretty crazy," Facebook engineer Ryan Mack wrote on the company blog. "We had to move a lot of mountains to go from the initial infrastructure review meeting to successfully turning on the 100% backend load test in just six months. Done another way, this project could have taken twice as long - and that’s being generous."

Liking things on Facebook used to just be about letting a friend know you're into what they're saying or posting. But in 2010, Facebook went a step further and released a Like button for the entire Internet, letting websites embed Like buttons almost anywhere.

Facebook recently revealed some statistics that revealed users create 3.2 billion likes and comments every day. 

The idea for it came from two Facebook engineers' shared realization that they had tons of videos on their phones, but nowhere to put them. 

Even though other video-sharing sites existed at that time—2007— the two saw the value in sharing videos on Facebook because users could easily tag their friends and also communicate through video messaging.

Facebook first added the ability to mention friends in status updates and wall posts in September 2009. But it wasn't until two years later that Facebook started letting users tag friends in comments. 

And it was all thanks to a Facebook intern.

"When he presented it at the forum, everyone's reaction was the same—we couldn't believe that someone hadn't built this yet," Facebook engineering manager Pedram Keyani writes on the Facebook blog. "It shipped to 100% of users within two weeks."

Even though this started as a hackathon project, many people saw this feature as a blatant response and copycat of Google+'s full-screen of photos. 

But Facebook describes it differently. Apparently one of its engineers was working on builds for new photo views and accidentally made a full-screen version.

"He liked the view so much he spent the next hackathon building a better prototype, which he then presented to the rest of the photos team," Facebook product designer Blaise DiPersia wrote on the company blog. "The team was similarly impressed -- they put a couple of finishing touches on the code and then shipped the feature to all users."

Type-ahead search makes it possible for you to see search results as you're typing. For example, if you start typing "MGM" to find the Facebook Page for the band MGMT, you'll see the search result come up before you're even finished typing. 

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