blog.philcrissman.com

I’m going back to Wordpress, for awhile, I think. I kept telling myself that the features I’d like to see in Mephisto, I would add. I think I could but I’m beginning to realize that I really don’t have the time, and I won’t have time for awhile.

So, back to Wordpress. Thanks for reading,

There was a lot of discussion awhile back about Facebook and its limit of 5,000 friends. The discussion, in case you (mercifully) missed it, was largely driven by social networking power users like Scoble.

I didn’t think too much about it at the time. Between now and then, I’ve thought a few times about social networks, and how they are implemented. Not the front end, but the back matter; the model. The database; users and connections.

A social network is fundamentally a graph. Most social networks are analogous to non-directed graphs – that is, there is no distinction which “direction” a connection goes. If you are friends with someone in Facebook or MySpace, they are also friends with you. Pownce and Twitter have taken a directed-graph approach, in which friendship (following) is not automatically mutual. I could follow you, but you might not follow me. And so on.