
The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul - raju
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_user_data_analysis.php
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greenlblue
Why is this kind of data ever going to be useful? People have 200+ friends on
their friends lists but only a handful of those are meaningful and the rest of
those links are just about facebook values in the same way that capitalism is
about the acquisition of money. So I'm a little afraid about people using this
data to generate social "insight".

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m0th87
One example I'm interested in exploring: eigenvector centrality analysis on
the social graph. It would be like a PageRank algorithm for people,
quantifying how influential individuals are. This necessitates a full social
graph. Having only a subset of it would be like Google only looking at the
first 10 links on a page for its search algorithm.

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byrneseyeview
Google used to limit the number of links they looked at. Now they don't
explicitly limit it, but they'll stop if the links seem boring.

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m0th87
For the PageRank chunk of their search algorithm? If so, that is fascinating,
because that means I could work with a graph subset and get good results.
Could you link me?

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byrneseyeview
Unfortunately, this is something I heard from a Googler at SMX East. And I
don't know how applicable it is--a human would find a long list of navigation
links boring, but to a search bot they have much more content than, e.g., a
list of "related pages".

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ippisl
He using amazon cloud services , instead of 80 legs for the crawling.

Wasn't the economics of 80 legs was supposed to be much better then amazon ?

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jdrock
Pete still uses us for his crawling. He switched over to AWS for some of his
crawling because we had a throttle on some of the sites he wanted to crawl.
But now that we know we can crawl those sites more quickly, we're looking into
relaxing the throttle.

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jasonlbaptiste
Can we edit the title to not be so emo?

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tokenadult
It's the original article title, which is preferred under the HN guidelines.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

"You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial
spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

I much prefer HN submissions to use an original article title, the better to
avoid duplicate submissions. And usually those titles are more interesting
than titles users here make up.

