You want to go social?

I think having a social newsfeed in your site has become a bare minimum requirement for most of the sites that aim to be an ecosystem in a certain field.

I thought of having that in ShortFilmWindow. Since I was totally out of touch, I had to really start digging lots of information around it.

What I have realised is that getting the data structure right is the biggest key. An interesting graph structure tailored to your user behaviour will impact system performance greatly.

I have collected some resources that might help folks understand the problem, define it better and take right decisions.
Most of these are good starting point and a person can dig deeper if need be.
They talk about graph structure and system for searching through it in a efficient way.  There are two courser courses that I am gonna take and make everyone in my development team take too (they are starting in a week).

Facebook Graph Structure and Search Systems:

Facebook graph search with neo4j: http://tinman.cs.gsu.edu/~raj/8711/sp13/neo4j/Neo4J_%20Report.pdf

Facebook distributed data store (Tao): https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/courses/fall2013/static/papers/11730-atc13-bronson.pdf

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-building-out-the-infrastructure-for-graph-search/10151347573598920

Facebook (Unicorn): http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol6/p1150-curtiss.pdf

Twitter Scalability:

http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/7/8/the-architecture-twitter-uses-to-deal-with-150m-active-users.html

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Twitter-Timeline-Scalability

Coursera Courses:

https://www.coursera.org/course/sna

https://www.coursera.org/course/networksonline

Anyways next step is personalization. But I have done enough ML courses to not get intimidated by it.   The above thing still intimidates me.

Design of life

I was writing some trailer notes for my trailer editor and was talking about nostalgia, childhood, longing etc that is the core theme of time machine and somewhere I wondered why was life designed like this where time was unidirectional and ephemeral? Why couldn't we visit childhood or youth the way we can visit different places in the world?

Anyways I ended up writing a story in this hypothetical world where one day the doorbell rings and we find that the older version of the family's son has come to visit the family. Initially there is super excitement- there are gifts and souvenirs and the older version is welcomes and he decides to stay on for a few days. However, gradually the family and even the son starts getting annoyed by the presence of this old intruder and start missing his privacy. The whole family keeps waiting and wondering when this old man will leave but feels it won't be right to enquire from him. They try to check his return tickets and worry when they don't find any.