Skip to main content

Social Networks: The power of symmetric relationships

A recent post on the bokardo.com blog by Joshua Porter, highlights the difference between relationships on Facebook and those on Twitter. Essentially on Facebook, relationships are made when a request for friendship is accepted by a person, adding both on each others contact list. If in time one person removes the other, the relationship is broken as the other will notice they are unable to contact the former friend without sending another friend request. This is a symmetrical relationship as it goes both ways, the other type of relationship is the assymetrical type that Twitter uses, you can follow some one without them following you, this allows people to expand their follow network without having to wait for confirmed friend requests, similarly others can follow you without requiring explicit confirmation. Essentially the default nature of Twitter conversations is as a broadcast to ALL that care to listen, where as with Facebook, the broadcast is to those who reciprocally wish to "hear" one another.

The argument is made in the post that the assymetric model is better for Facebook to persue because of the ability to allow users to rapidly expand their social network without requiring confirmations. I agree that in a social network such as Twitter it is better, as the broadcast model is best served but there are some important constraints architecturally to the choices. Twitter's broadcast to any , assymetric model makes the process of updating followers significantly more tedious than for a symmetric model which has a relatively limited number of managed relationships. The Twitter API showed the weakness of the need to propagate so many updates to so many followers per tweet in the early days when it had many outages. As it grew it stuttered under the sudden spikes on the architecture when tweet floods propagated through the system. Even today, the site still experiences "the whale" when load spikes. The real time nature of Twitter that makes it so valuable as a means of notifying "who ever is listening" also exerts crushing demands on the architecture. The assymetrical model allows fast scaling of a users social network but exacts the cost from the fragile infrastructure of Twitter. A recent architectural redesign has mitigated some of the issues but as it continues to grow , the exponential nature of broadcasting assymetrically will continue to dog the infrastructure. Conversely, Facebooks symmetrical model is much less prone to the effect of spikes as users send status updates. The scope of the updates is limited to their friends , which tend to be significantly smaller than the number of followers on twitter. Recently the addition of "Pages" replicates the asymmetrical model of Twiiter. Facebook is much bigger than Twitter and has over all more load but it also has a much larger infrastructure of nodes distributed across the globe to handle the load. However, the usefulness of assymetric networks varies with the social network. In a business that has an intranet that allows employees from different departments to collaborate, having an assymetrical model for some users and symmetrical model for others could be very beneficial. For example, for the members of various departments in the company , the social network should be restricted only to the members of those departments. Sales, Tech, Biz Dev...etc. This ensures that the conversations had between members are relevant to the department they share. However, the ability to have assymetrical communication between say the CEO and the rest of the company (regardless of their department) should also be possible. In a business social network a hybrid of the two models, controlled by relevant security is ideal. The goal in this case is not to reach as many people as possible but on the one level (department) reach specific people sharing work related functions, and on another it is reaching everyone in the company. By granting selective ability to broadcast events to these different users based on the position of the sender in the company, greater utility can be made by the business of the service. Allowing the relationship types that are most efficient for the networks that arise in business is important and will vary from business to business. So far, neither Facebook or Twitter allow this functionality for a business...allowing the business to control the social networks within its virtual walls by weaving the use of symmetric and assymetric forms and tying the interactions under a secure umbrella. The numeroom.com site provides this secure combination of network types and allows businesses to deploy and manage them easily using what are called TimeLine Events. I'll be revealing more on TimeLines and how they facilitate efficient business networks in subsequent posts.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

the attributes of web 3.0...

As the US economy continues to suffer the doldrums of stagnant investment in many industries, belt tightening budgets in many of the largest cities and continuous rounds of lay offs at some of the oldest of corporations, it is little comfort to those suffering through economic problems that what is happening now, has happened before. True, the severity of the downturn might have been different but the common factors of people and businesses being forced to do more with less is the theme of the times. Like environmental shocks to an ecosystem, stresses to the economic system lead to people hunkering down to last the storm, but it is instructive to realize that during the storm, all that idle time in the shelter affords people the ability to solve previous or existing problems. Likewise, economic downturns enable enterprising individuals and corporations the ability to make bold decisions with regard to marketing , sales or product focus that can lead to incredible gains as the economic

How many cofactors for inducing expression of every cell type?

Another revolution in iPSC technology announced: "Also known as iPS cells, these cells can become virtually any cell type in the human body -- just like embryonic stem cells. Then last year, Gladstone Senior Investigator Sheng Ding, PhD, announced that he had used a combination of small molecules and genetic factors to transform skin cells directly into neural stem cells. Today, Dr. Huang takes a new tack by using one genetic factor -- Sox2 -- to directly reprogram one cell type into another without reverting to the pluripotent state." -- So the method invented by Yamanaka is now refined to rely only 1 cofactor and b) directly generate the target cell type from the source cell type (skin to neuron) without the stem like intermediate stage.  It also mentions that oncogenic triggering was eliminated in their testing. Now comparative methods can be used to discover other types...the question is..is Sox2 critical for all types? It may be that skin to neuron relies on Sox2

AgilEntity Architecture: Action Oriented Workflow

Permissions, fine grained versus management headache The usual method for determining which users can perform a given function on a given object in a managed system, employs providing those Users with specific access rights via the use of permissions. Often these permissions are also able to be granted to collections called Groups, to which Users are added. The combination of Permissions and Groups provides the ability to provide as atomic a dissemination of rights across the User space as possible. However, this granularity comes at the price of reduced efficiency for managing the created permissions and more importantly the Groups that collect Users designated to perform sets of actions. Essentially the Groups serve as access control lists in many systems, which for the variable and often changing environment of business applications means a need to constantly update the ACL’s (groups) in order to add or remove individuals based on their ability to perform cert