@thehigherlife - I was thinking about the same thing recently (an announcement about FB becoming the biggest photo app on the planet). I found two great sources of information on this..
Very deep analysis of Flickr's arch from a couple of years ago - including a link to a presentation to Cal Henderson's slides. I'm surprised he got canned from Y! yesterday though!
i don't know anything about cal's departure, but i can say that any large co like yahoo, google, msft, apple etc is more or less impervious against the loss of one or a few technical individuals. his departure may have symbolic value but the machine that is chugging there will keep chugging, for better or for worse
- http://highscalability.com/flickr-architecture
Very deep analysis of Flickr's arch from a couple of years ago - including a link to a presentation to Cal Henderson's slides. I'm surprised he got canned from Y! yesterday though!