At Facebook’s F8 developer conference, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg boasted that the company would have a billion “likes” by end of the day. That’s a big number, one that would make any company think twice about the load it might put on their web infrastructure. Not Facebook -– or at least that’s what Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering, and Jonathan Heiliger, Vp of tech operations, told me when I ran into them earlier today. Both of them were looking awfully relaxed for guys who were in charge of an infrastructure being put to through a stress test.

“We do a lot more traffic every day than the load a billion ‘likes’ might generate,” Schroepfer remarked. It’s clear that Facebook has learned from Google that infrastructure is a vital and a strategic advantage. No wonder it’s building its own data centers. I think that’s one of the reasons it allows its chief to set audacious goals such as the “entire web is going to be social.” Otherwise Facebook can become the single point of failure for this social web.