Author Archives: Stuart G. Hall

About Stuart G. Hall

Making a positive difference one day at a time. #London #Leicester

Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong?

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Key points as to why Facebook’s attempt to copy Twitter won’t work:

As anyone who has worked in real time systems knows, when you increase the velocity you have to decrease the volume of the content.

The other thing we suspect is that they haven’t architected their network for real time comms – it nearly broke Twitter with c 1.2m people, so we watch with bated breath to see how Facebook’s architecture will cope with 120m people.

Update – quite a few people have pointed out that the Facebook model is more similar to Friendfeed than Twitter – good point, and thats what I meant by “getting it wrong still” in that I think Friendfeed has suffered from two issues I noted above:

– Too much information on the real time feed
– Not letting a user community define/design the service systems

As the Guardian points out this is a part of yet another re-design which appears to make the site more complex (er, I think the words is ‘complicated’ as complex is the flip-side of simple, I thank you;-)

PS: Note Twitter itself has had a refresh, with integrated Trends and Search functionality.

Social search IS the new semantic web?

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Cool article about value of social search:

Using  links as votes is a large part of most search engines’ algorithms. Google has wisely started gathering user information by allowing users to personalize these search results. One of the next steps is being able to search through the “most discussed” results of a query, not just the one with more links.  Sites like TweetMeme are already sorting out links that are forwarded the most. Other sites return search results across multiple social networks. Being able to search these results, a database of socially screened resources, presents some cool opportunties.

Any search engine that is not paying attention to the potential and growth of searching within social networks will begin to lose their value.

Note my comment about how the heck does this all fit in with the grand plan of the semantic web. Perhaps, suggests Jakrose’s reply, social search IS the new semantic web?

The other way of lookign at social search is a search engine which enables sharing. Take a look at Microsoft Research’s U Rank prototype as an example.