That's right. Facebook is a technology company, serving billions and billions of pages each week (actually, over 100 billion per week, but I couldn't resist a nod to Carl Sagan and McDonald's). And doing so efficiently. So it should come as no surprise that the company has developed some unique software. On Feb. 2, the company released HipHop for PHP.

What is HipHop for PHP? Facebook describes it as:

...a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

This is a fascinating look behind the scenes of arguably one of the most successful websites ever (and certainly, one of the most successful PHP-based websites). But do so quickly before Google, Oracle or someone with higher revenues and / or stock valuation decides to snatch Facebook up...