Well, firstly, I don't believe you can run something that big on rented hardware. Facebook has over 800 million users.
Let's say you store just 500 kilobytes of data per user. That's
800,000,000 * 500 = 400,000,000,000 kilobytes.
400,000,000,000 kb = ~372 Terabytes of storage alone.
Secondly, even if it as all rented and managed by someone else - you're still going to pay for it!
I just think Pete's got his head in the clouds on this one.
I have a feeling it's going to involve some kind of peer - peer stuff where bits of data are stored on peoples machines or some such. Even ignoring the security issues there, I still think it would be horrendously unreliable and I don't know what happens with mobile stuff.
I just Pete has massively underestimated what it genuinely costs to run something on the scale of Facebook. I don't doubt one could write a better platform and so on, but I think they'll all get cold sharp shocks when they try and scale it into the millions of users.
You can eat pizza with your milkshake. Best o' both worlds. :)
Now, what sort of milkshake are you having?
Oh.
:-S
Why not?