VISITORS TO the Science Gallery on Monday were treated to an inside view of Facebook as part of the Innovation Dublin festival with a talk from Mike Schroepfer, vice-president of engineering at the social networking site.

Schroepfer gave a curious audience insight into the innovation of a platform that, he said, plays host to status updates and content ranging from the “extraordinarily profound to the extraordinarily mundane”.

With half a billion regular users who spend 700 billion minutes each month sharing 30 billion pieces of content, from photos to status updates to location, he said the current challenge for Facebook is to innovate at scale.

The company does this, he said, by ignoring the traditional method of becoming more conservative as an organisation grows. “Success causes risk aversion – there is more to lose,” he said, adding that one of Facebook’s mottos is “Move fast and break things”.

This motto is applied to newly-hired Facebook engineers straight away: they make decisions from the first day and are treated to a bootcamp style induction in the first week. They are also encouraged to take part in the 24-hour “Hackathons” at Facebook HQ that have produced several innovations now used on the site.

Schroepfer also tackled one of the hottest topics surrounding the site: that it undergoes so many changes and often receives complaints from hordes of unhappy users or developers as a result.

Another motto is: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” He said this is applied even if it is painful in the short term, referring to the decision to remove application updates in the news stream. He added that none of these changes are taken lightly.

Looking at the possibility of serious competition for Facebook, Schroepfer said there is “plenty of room” for innovation and disruption. Many big companies in the past were typically disrupted by smaller start-ups “they never saw coming”, he said, adding the current move towards social media will disrupt a lot of organisations today. “The biggest risk to Facebook is a new series of companies that better understand new market trends.”