But I think he meant more than that. He meant they approach problems (including nontechnical ones) the way technical people do. That's an interesting idea. And it seems to be working, too.

Facebook certainly is powered by technology and its future certainly relies on innovating using technology. Why don't you clarify what you mean in more than a single sentence?

- We are the largest user in the world of memcached, an open-source caching system. Originally developed by LiveJournal, we've since made so many scalability improvements and performance upgrades that we will be the primary contributor of features in the next major release.

- We've created a custom-built search engine serving millions of queries a day, completely distributed and entirely in-memory, with real-time updates.

http://www.facebook.com/jobs_engineering.php

Invention means to create new technology. Innovation means to recombine old technologies for a new purpose.

Technology companies invent. Technical companies innovate.

Advice: Don't be a technology company. Profits are a function of how much people want your product, not how much you spend on R&D. If you can make something people want for zero R&D, versus making something people want that requires a huge investment, the intelligent choice should be obvious.

This is the premise of Seth Godin's book Free Prize Inside. That is, you could spend 50 million dollars inventing a new cereal that will double sales if it succeeds (but will most likely fail), or you could double sales just by putting a free prize inside.

So is Facebook a technology? Yes, I think so. It's a useful tool for promoting events and for keeping track of friends (contacts, what they are up to).

I agree that it isn't the most challenging or complex type of technology, but I've found some of the features (on Facebook) to be quite useful and entertaining.