Facebook Chat: 1 Billion Messages A Day

Activity on Facebook Chat has reached 1 billion messages per day, the company said on its Facebook Engineering blog. It's the latest in a series of huge numbers and milestones for the fast-growing social networking service. Earlier Monday ComScore reported that Facebook had officially passed MySpace as the largest social network among U.S. users, the last demographic for which MySpace could still claim dominion.

As with many earlier engineering posts, Facebook's Chris Piro cited the company's constant performance tweaking for the Chat service. "We've invested a lot in making Chat stable and scalable in the past, and we continue making improvements even now," writes Piro. "We've increased the capacity of our load balancers so we can accept more concurrent users, and we're investigating ways to make the backend and frontend more robust against failures."