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.