3 ms·
To be fair to the rest of the industry, a single glance at the front page shows size of the TRANSITIVE CLOSURE of your social network. Why would you do that?
by lallysingh 16y ago
To be fair to the rest of the industry, a single glance at the front page shows size of the TRANSITIVE CLOSURE of your social network.
Why would you do that?
This is bread & butter algorithm analysis. Don't put O(n^2) analyses on your most-loaded page.
- shalinmangar 16y agoYou are assuming that it is computed on page load.
- spitfire 16y agoI actually respect that. While facebook brags about their "social graph" (IE: A list of friends they don't do anything with), friendster tried to take on the hard CS problems. Sure they failed, but they were never fake about it. And they were one of the first.
- aamar 16y agoI have heard from insiders that the founder viewed this feature--the count of people 3 degrees away--as the central embodiment of the magic of Friendster, an absolute must-have. I.e. people added friends in great part in order to feel more connected to 100ks of people. Others in the company begged to at least back it down to a count of people 2 degrees away; but the founder insisted that the magic was the 3-degree version. So instead the company pursued technical strategies to speed up the 3-degree count; don't know what those were precisely, but it seems that they were not pursued as zealously as they could be (due to VoIP, etc. distractions). My understanding, by the way, is that the network size was computed on page-load until surprisingly very late, due to the perceived need for real-time. Even after it was cached, it was still computationally expensive, as your numbers were computed (roughly) every time your 3-degree network added a link. In retrospect, A/B testing could have been used to test the executive vision. So although my first reaction upon hearing this story (years ago) was: "that's big-O insanity," now I think that it's just as much a story about willingness to subject vision to empirical data and performing clinical cost/benefit analysis (when appropriate).
- kragen 16y agoBecause Sixdegrees did that. In fact, it was the entire marketing point of Sixdegrees. I don't think Friendster was trying to imitate Sixdegrees generally — after all, it was a failed bubble business — but unavoidably you tend to model what you're building after things that you've seen before.