Does anyone have the associated talk (I'm assuming this slide deck was for a speech)? I'm really interesting in hearing more details about the design.

Sweet [found them](http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=51412338919). There's four videos linked in the post.

Very cool to see these aspects of Erlang being used in real world practical developement tasks. I've felt that other functional programming languages tended to be focused more towards academia, but it seems like the design of Erlang lends itself well to concurrent problems.

I did some UI work with the guys who made Qunu. They used similar techniques for in-browser chat: Erlang, "binding" via AJAX long polling. It was pretty advanced stuff at the time (3-4 years ago) - I believe other in-browser chat services like Meebo used polling.

I worked on a project similar to these and did a bit of research on existing solutions. If I remember correctly (I'm trying to find the document) Meebo uses a custom lighthttpd and does long polling.

I think that Facebook chat is one of the more audacious software engienering projects of recent time, simply because of the technical difficulty and almost simultaneous rollout to hundreds of millions of users.