Good point--I was just wondering if anyone had a comment on that thought. Sounds ridiculous to me...

Reddit, Netflix, and Facebook all use Cassandra. I think Techcrunch may have A) misunderstood or B) been referring to archaic PHP code.

EDIT: Actually, it looks like TC has a history of believing Cassandra = Bad for digg.com: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineeri...

I was under the impression Facebook replaced Cassandra in their stack with HBase.

Yes, I forgot about Netflix! Not only do they use it, but they've provided tons of excellent tools for it (Astyanax, Priam) and blog about it very frequently.

Yes; Facebook has since abandoned Cassandra.