You spent 34 days in “lockdown” to launch Graph Search. What’s lockdown?

LOREN CHENG: It’s a time at Facebook when we say, “Hey, we’ve got this goal, it’s pretty near term--we’re gonna double down and focus on it.” It lends focus. You make decisions faster. You shut down other meetings. At the beginning of our lockdown, the team got together and had a massive five-hour meeting where nobody was allowed to leave, where we figured out exactly what we were going to tackle. We filled three whiteboards full of ideas, and eventually I said, “Look, we have a very limited amount of time. If you would fall on your sword for something to be in there, what would it be?” It ended up being our “sword list,” and all tasks had to relate to something on the sword list.

Version 3.0 of graph search is going to be spooky.  Until then, it can be the quirky cousin.

The quirky cousin that's mostly unused.

I do like the concept of a "sword list", though.