On yesterday's "This Week in Tech<http://www.twit.tv/254>" (TWiT) podcast with Leo Laporte (Wiki: http://wiki.twit.tv/wiki/TWiT_254), Kevin Rose of Digg<http://digg.com/> fame was a guest. He gave a public preview of the new Digg 4; it looks very nice and should be released in the next month or two. He also mentioned that Digg 4 is using Cassandra and that it is an Apache Open Source project. He mentioned Twitter and how the Twitter and Digg engineers have been working closely on Cassandra related issues. There was a passing reference to Digg also working with Facebook engineers, but I could be wrong on that point.
On a related but separate note: While I am fairly new to Cassandra and have only been following the mailing lists for a few months, the conversation with Kevin Rose on TWiT made me curious if the versions of Cassandra that Digg, Twitter, and Facebook are using may end up being forks of the Apache project or old versions. As the Apache Cassandra project moves forward with new features, are these large and very public installations of Cassandra going to be able to continue contributing patches and features and/or accept patches and features from the Apache project? While most recent commits appear to come from Eric Evans and Jonathan Ellis, the committers<http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/Committers> list for Cassandra does include, among many others, Facebook, Twitter, and Digg. My apology if anyone feels this is an inappropriate post to this list. Todd