management and personalization technologies, large-scale systems and scalable infrastructure, mobile technologies, and advertising technologies, including: develop new products for our users, developers, and marketers. Our product development philosophy is centered on continuous innovation in creating products that are social by design, which means that our products are designed to place people and their social interactions at the core of the product experience. Facebook experience, we must process and analyze a vast and growing amount of content shared by our users, developers, and marketers and surface the most relevant content in real time. As such, we invest extensively in developing technologies and analytics in areas including content optimization and delivery, graph query, media storage and serving, large-scale data management, and software performance. infrastructure. We use a combination of off-the-shelf and custom software running on clusters of commodity computers to amass substantial computing capability. Our infrastructure has enabled the storage and processing of large datasets and facilitated the deployment of our products on a global scale. As our user base grows, and the level of engagement and sharing from our users continues to increase, our computing needs continue to expand. We aim to provide our products rapidly and reliably to all users around the world, including in countries where we do not expect significant short-term monetization. As the number of international users increases we are investing in extending our infrastructure to be closer to our users wherever they are in the world. We are currently building our first major custom international datacenter presence in Lulea, Sweden, which is expected to be operational in the first half of 2013. devices and operating systems, we invest in developing novel techniques and technologies including: custom graphics rendering, operating system customizations, development tools, systems for customizing the user experience based on a variety of factors, and systems for monitoring the behavior of the applications in the field. of ad impressions every day while maximizing the relevance of each impression to selected users based upon the information that users have chosen to share. Our system manages our entire set of ads, the selected audiences, and the marketers' bids to determine which ads to show each person and how to display them for every page on Facebook. We use an advanced click prediction system that weighs many real-time updated features using automated learning techniques. Our technology incorporates the estimated click-through rate with both the marketer's bid and a user relevancy signal to select the optimal ads to show. "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations Results of Operations Research and development" of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. |