Simon Willison’s Weblog

Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors. I asked Kellan about scaling activity streams the other day. Here he suggests the best technique is not to promise a perfect stream (like Twitter does)—Facebook used to get away with 80% loss of update messages, but their new redesign has changed the contract with their users.

# 19th March 2009, 2:02 pm / activitystreams, facebook, kellan-elliott-mccrea, scaling, twitter

Parallel merge sort in Erlang. Thoughts on an Erlang-y way of implementing a combined activity stream (e.g. Facebook and Twitter). Activity streams are a Really Hard Problem—as far as I know there’s no best practise for implementing them yet.

# 15th March 2009, 1:36 pm / activitystreams, erlang, facebook, twitter