We all know how big and how quickly Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and the like had to scale. To do so, they had to think outside the box, and make not only wide use, but also many upgrades and contributions to countless open source software projects.

It’s something we sadly something we hear very little about – corporate secrecy keeps much of the juicy details at bay – but these next generation services are not only using these projects, but also making significant contributions to open-source projects and even open sourcing entire chunks of their codebase.

I’d like to sit back for a minute, take a look at what these web powerhouses have been building, and appreciate their contributions to everyone’s development.

Yep, there we go, I said it. There is nothing that I hate more than AJAX.

Not very “Web 2.0″ of me, is it? Well, not exactly.

That’s because this rant isn’t about asynchronous Javascript and XML. This is about people who use AJAX interchangeably with “Javascript”, who think that AJAX means their website looks good, and who think that AJAX should be used for every single thing on their site.