Archive for October, 2009

Challenges of scaling Social Networks

Oct 14th

Posted by admin in professional

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Read this nice article in High Scalability about scaling Social Networks.

Let’s say you have 200 friends. When you hit your Facebook account it has to go gather the status of all 200 of your friends at the same time so you can see what’s new for them. That means 200 requests need to go out simultaneously, the replies need to be merged together, other services need to be contacted to get more details, and all this needs to be munged together and sent through PHP and a web server so you see your Facebook page in a reasonable amount of time. Oh my.

Being a developer in eBay, I can comment on its architecture only.   Clearly eBay’s current scale can be attributed to sharding. Wherein a table is distributed in many databases.  Data belonging to a particular user reside in one of the databases only.

Now if eBay decides to implement social features in its site it will have to rearchitect its whole datamodel.

Lets say eBay developes a Twitter style Live status page for the user’s friends, then with the current architecture it will have to query the status of each friend from different database.

Some day when free I will write a post about how ebay can implement Social features.

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keyword metatag not used by google

Oct 14th

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This came as a big surprise to me. All the SEO schools have been teaching the importance of “keyword” html metatag.

I think this is a nice move by Google. It will curb the menace of keword stuffing. Now on I will not have to break my head to come up with wise keywords for my blog post. Will concentrate on the writing good stuff.

At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions below.

Read more about this at Google’s Webmasters Blog.

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New Age Ramayana.

Oct 14th

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Brilliant stuff by krishashok.

Ramayana – Core Value Proposition
View more presentations from krishashok.

Making Ajax Searchable

Oct 14th

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Google has come up with a set of guidlines to make Ajax applications Searchable.  This was a major limitations for the Ajax applications.

While AJAX-based websites are popular with users, search engines traditionally are not able to access any of the content on them. The last time we checked, almost 70% of the websites we know about use JavaScript in some form or another. Of course, most of that JavaScript is not AJAX, but the better that search engines could crawl and index AJAX, the more that developers could add richer features to their websites and still show up in search engines.

Read more about the this at google webmasters blog.

They say the best design is the simplest design.

Google’s proposal seems rather complicated. If that is the case with a technical person like me not sure how is it going to fare with other folks.Plus this approach has to get the blessings of other search engine.

Whats missing is a reference implementation. Google should definitely make one so that we can understand this better.

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Send email to Appengine

Oct 14th

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Now we can send email to appengine. This is really a cool feature. And greatly enhance the features that developers can use.

Incoming Email – Your App Engine app has been able to send email for some time … but now, with 1.2.6, your app can also receive email. After enabling mail as an inbound service (just like XMPP), users can email your application at whatever@yourappid.appspotmail.com. Inbound messages are converted to HTTP requests (again, just like XMPP) which you can receive via webhook handler. Docs for Python, Java.

Can’t wait to try this new feature.

Read more details at Google Appengine blog.

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