Archive for the ‘Soical Networking’ Category

Facebook Open Sources ‘Tornado’ the Engine That Drives FriendFeed

Posted by Farhan on September 14th, 2009 | No Comments »

When Facebook acquired FriendFeed back in August, the big question was, what would Facebook do with FriendFeed? While that question remains up in the air, Facebook has done something with the code that powers FriendFeed, namely, released it as an open source framework.

Tornado, as the new, Python-based web framework is known, is designed specifically to handle the massive server loads of FriendFeed’s real-time updates. By releasing Tornado as open source, Facebook is giving developers a way to use FriendFeed’s core infrastructure in their own real-time web projects.

While most large scale web services, for example Twitter, have had trouble scaling as their user base grows, FriendFeed managed to avoid most of those problems, which makes Tornado all the more appealing to developers looking to build the next generation of real-time web apps.

Under the hood Tornado looks a bit like other Python frameworks such as Django or web.py, but specializes in handling concurrent connections — the sort of thing you need to build a news aggregator, real-time chat app or your own version of FriendFeed or Twitter.

The FriendFeed developers have benchmarked Tornado handling over 8,000 requests per second when run as four load-balanced processes (behind Nginx) on a four core server. Compare that to Django, which can handle only about 2200 requests per second on the same hardware setup. Tornado’s impressive capabilities are the result of its non-blocking architecture and its use of epoll to handle thousands of simultaneous standing connections

Tornado also comes with all the basic building blocks you’d typically need for a social network site — user authentication, cross-site request forgery protection, templates, signed cookies, localization, aggressive static file caching and more.

Tornado follows in the footstep of web.py and Django as a loosely coupled framework — you can use only what you want and mix in other Python libraries as the need arises. In other words, Tornado is not an all or nothing framework.

Bret Taylor, one of the co-founders of FriendFeed, has more details on what makes Tornado tick. If you’d like to see Tornado in action, head over to the real-time chat application which makes an impressive demo of Tornado’s power.

So what can you do with Tornado? Well, if you’re developing any sort of real-time web app we strongly suggest giving Tornado a look. While it seems that at a certain point just about any framework will fail and you’ll be forced to write a custom solution, Tornado’s real-world experience at FriendFeed means that it may well get you farther down the path to becoming the next Twitter than most frameworks.

Tornado is available under the Apache open source license and can be downloaded from the new Tornado website (documentation and sample code are available here).

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Filed under Facebook, Soical Networking | Tags: Bret Taylor, Django, Facebook, FriendFeed, Open source, Programming, Python, Twitter


Social Networks, Mobile Attract Job Seekers

Posted by Farhan on August 13th, 2009 | No Comments »

August 12, 2009

Job-seeking in this 21st century recession may just have gone viral and mobile.

Since the start of the recession in December 2007, about 6.7 million workers have been laid off according to latest statistics — at a time the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have exploded, drawing millions of users per day.

As these sites continue to alter social and cultural landscapes, they are also transforming the job search process, enabling more and more people to connect with potential employers, promote their own skills, set up support groups and search for job leads and contacts.

“Mobile technology and social networking has shifted the whole job search paradigm,” said Susan Joyce, editor of Job-Hunt.Org, a site offering online job search tips. “You don’t need to stay glued to your phone or computer at home anymore.”

With mobile devices playing a bigger role in the social networking phenomenon, any job hopeful with a Web-connected or smartphone can now compose resumes, view job listings and contact prospective employers on the go. < H3>The resume of the future

Joyce suggests creating a resume through popular networking site LinkedIn — a business networking site that lets users create a profile, list skills, work history, employment goals and contact details — is among the more secure ways to compile a resume online.

It can be done via Research in Motion’s Blackberry device or Apple’s iPhone, she added.

“The LinkedIn Profile is really the resume of the future,” Joyce said. “The ‘resume’ on LinkedIn is really the standard LinkedIn Profile, but it’s very popular with recruiters looking for good candidates.

“You could build your whole LinkedIn presence from any Web-enabled phone.”

There are any number of job-search applications — downloadable programs for your phone — available for the iPhone, for instance, including one piloted by recruitment consultancy Harvey Nash. Others pool information on jobs in travel and in education, among other sectors.

With jobs still scarce, many hopefuls are getting creative about getting noticed. Many have begun using Twitter — a microblogging service that allows users to send 140-character messages at a time — to get the word out.

A career is unlikely to be launched on Twitter alone, but candidates are increasingly “tweeting” or posting messages to outline their skills, experiences and career goals. They are pasting links to their resumes on the micro-blogging service.

People can also use Twitter to follow recruiters or companies of interest and learn of networking events.

Job seekers have gotten job leads and tips on networking events that they otherwise would have missed, had it not been for their Twitter or Facebook account.
Layoffs Cafe and LaidOff Camp

“It’s really helped in these hard times. You have a much easier time finding job and networking events. And every time I go to one of these events, I add at least one connection,” said Nilo Sarraf, who was laid off from Yahoo recently and formed a Silicon Valley online networking group called Layoffs Cafe at www.meetup.com/Layoffs-cafe/.

Layoffs Cafe is one of several online support groups that have sprung up during the downturn, tipping off job seekers where physical networking events are taking place.

Chris Hutchins, a former management and business strategy consultant in Silicon Valley, launched LaidOffCamp as the online component to offline events.

“We focus on organizing events for people who are unemployed,” said Hutchins, noting there have been about 11 “LaidOff Camps” set up around the country, drawing anywhere from 100 to 600 participants who attend panels on topics such as how to live on a budget, how to develop a personal brand and how to find a job in the current market.

“We spent no dollars on marketing. If it weren’t for social media and blogs, Laidoff Camp wouldn’t exist,” he said.

While candidates these days are taking advantage of being able to easily access job information, one of the downsides, according to job seekers and employment experts, is managing the data.

“It can be overwhelming. It’s hard to weed out all the information and manage your time,” said Sarraf.

Privacy issues and falling prey to the many recruiting, work-at-home, make-a-million and resume creation software scams are also risks for the unwary.

“When someone is job hunting, they need to be careful. I know a lot of people who have been hurt by bogus resume companies. People tend to think if it’s online, it’s legitimate and when you’re doing a resume, people are being asked to provide a lot of personal information, such as where you live and your social security number,” she added.

Filed under Soical Networking


Social Web Reshaping How Media Works: Shirky

Posted by Farhan on August 12th, 2009 | No Comments »

SAN JOSE, Calif. — The one thing the rise of social media’s proven is most of us aren’t couch potatoes. In a wide ranging analysis of social media trends, author Clay Shirky said for years we’ve been operating on a “lousy understandings of human behavior.”

Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody,” said that in the 1990s, the prevailing wisdom was most people spent hours watching television because they liked it. He doesn’t deny that the TV remains a popular pastime, but said the rise of social media shows people also want to produce and interact with content.

“Sometimes we like to produce, sometimes we like to share, but we didn’t have media that let us do that” until now, he said in a keynote address here at the Search Engine Strategies conference.

With the rise of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and other social networks, Shirky said the media landscape is increasing in both size and visibility. He gave several examples of how unpaid bloggers and others Netizens forced companies to change their policies and impacted social change. He cited one example of a blogger in Thailand who posted the first pictures of a coup in 2006 against the government there after the military cracked down on the established media.

“The military hadn’t figured out blogging and she takes one of first photos of the tanks and all the global voice of other media are pointing to her blog,” Shirky said. “All of a sudden, she’s become one of the go-to sites because she committed an act of journalism.”

But in an interesting rejoinder to that story, Shirky recalled how the blogger later posted a more frivolous entry about looking for a new phone with a Hello Kitty design. She was then besieged by comments asking for more posts about the coup. In response, she wrote a post that explained she could write about whatever she wanted to on her blog and, as Shirky summarized, basically said “if you don’t like it, leave.”

“No professional media outlet in the world would tell its readers to buzz off,” he said. The difference with social media, he continued, is the content creators have intrinsic motivations that aren’t, for example, about money.

“We are living in the middle of the largest expansion of expressive capability in the history of media,” Shirky said.

And companies that don’t get it risk losing or alienating customers. He criticized a Johnson & Johnson blog for customers from last year, since updated, that asked readers to limit their comments to Johnson & Johnson but to make any comments on the company’s products at a separate site specific to the product.

Contrary to the intent, the J&J blog “was really a one-way conversation,” he said.
Tech gets boring — and that brings change

As social media seeps deeper into general use, it’s impact will grow significantly Shirky predicts. “These tools don’t get interesting until they get technologically boring.” He said it’s not the “shiny new tool” that brings revolution — instead, it’s brought about by the shiny new tool that becomes old hat.

Shirky recalled that during the last decade, there was a lot of speculation that most people over 60 wouldn’t use e-mail. Not only did they use it, but “now you talk to teenagers today, and they think e-mail is only for old people,” Shirky said. “Once e-mail became normal, that’s when social changes occurred.”

He said social media and networks have brought us a period of “mass amateurization.”

“The number of tasks people can do on the Web on their own is exploding,” he added.

But Shirky said professionals often mistake the blogs, wikis and personal Web sites as smaller or more limited versions of what a professional can do.

“These aren’t sloppy professionals,” he countered, “but people doing things in a different way.”

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