On 2/26/09 7:19 PM, Nick Arnett wrote:
Yes, you probably don't, unless you just want to do it occasionally.
I'm working on some graph manipulations like that... the challenge is
that Twitter is so open that the graphs are enormous for many people.
This isn't a very hard problem on a small scale, but generalizing it
looks like it will take a lot of resources.
Huh? Now that Twitter has added the two social graph APIs that return
the entire list of IDs, this kind of social graph inspection becomes
trivially easy: two API calls, and one set operation (intersect). Even
at 1M followers, if the two lists are sorted, this is an O(N) operation.
A relational database falls down very fast on this kind of analysis.
For example, I have more than 300 followers, which is a simple
query... but it returns 300 users and now the query needs to ask who the
followers of those 300 are, to answer question No. 1. That's a big,
slow query, since it has to specify the ids of the 300 that I follow...
or it is 300 smaller queries. Either way, ugh. That query is going to
return a very large number of items, many of which need to be compared
with one another.
Say WHAT? Are we looking at the same question? Here's what I saw:
>> 1) Does anyone I follow also Ed?
Two API calls - one to fetch everyone Joe follows, one to fetch all of
Ed's followers. Compute the set intersection ... done. This should
take no longer than 5 minutes to implement, and should perform just fine.
So... I'm also curious who else is working on social graph problems.
Also... show of hands, please... who else would use this kind of
capability if it were available? I may be able to come up with
resources to make it happen.
Seriously, I could have put this into Twitter Karma when the new social
graph API methods were announced, but who cares? Studying the social
graph is only interesting to ivory tower academic wankers who want an
excuse to hang out on social networking sites as part of their PhD study.
If anyone can come up with an actual valuable use case for these kinds
of reports that aren't purely navel gazing and ego fluffing exercises,
I'll implement it for you in Twitter Karma. It's not hard stuff.
--
Dossy Shiobara | [email protected] | http://dossy.org/
Panoptic Computer Network | http://panoptic.com/
"He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own
folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70)
