Facebook GRAPH

I know everyone(at least pretend) uses Facebook and you should be noting that for last few weeks your Facebook homepage must me appearing different. Don’t say me no. It’s all due to new application from Facebook called as GRAPH. The is the 3rd revolutionary application from their stable. The other two were Newsfeed and Timeline.

So what’s Graph, it’s a search application (remember the various graph algorithms we studied in our days of Engineering) and it works in the same fashion. Suppose you wanted to search anything about let’s say about Tiger. Traditional search solutions like Google will return the same results for everyone unless you signed in google and they track your search using the cookies. Facebook GRAPH will use your friends list (Deloitte calls it as Networking) to get everything related to Tiger. If someone in your network had visited Bandipur and commented that its better than Mudumalai, it’s going to influence your decision. Some of us stalk behind people to get info, no need going forward.

You can also have a little bit more insight about graph based search from the below link,

Regarding the privacy, yes Facebook allows to have a control on the visibility/availability of your profile for search.

A futuristic approach-Moving Gaming to Cloud

I was in constant fear due to my aging laptop as with the new games it needed a upgrade to support them. Everyone knows that upgrading a laptop is an expensive affair. I was wondering why we can’t find a solution to this with available technologies. I think the answer is cloud computing. Nowadays we see very large implementations being moved into the cloud space and infrastructure is being used in a wise manner. We also need to know that the popular games in facebook like Farmville can also be categorized as games in cloud.

If we move all our games to cloud then it’s just a plug and play type. All we need is switch on your laptop connect to net, login and start the action. The companies like EA sports, Microsoft also stand to benefit as if the gaming is moved to cloud it will totally eradicate piracy. Even from mobiles which have less computing power compared to desktops can be used as a medium to play power packed games.

But I guess it will take time to move gaming into cloud as still the penetration of broadband internet is low and initially it may face a stiff resistance from the gamers as even the fortune 500 companies are yet to move their entire IT infrastructure to cloud. But it will be a paradigm shift as the industry will coin a new term called GaaS which Is an acronym for Gaming as a Service.

Importance of Social Media

For almost all PR agencies today to showcassing their clients in spotlight in social media like Twitter,LinkedIn and Facebook has become a necessity one.

Few years back before social media entered actually entered, people would socialize in marriages, corporate events and summits and build their connections. But now its not the case with social media entering into the living rooms. Comedies centering the impact of social media like father asking his son to come for dinner through facebook has become a real one.

Once a product is lauched in the market, immediately the social media is flooded with 360 degree analysis of the product and if negatives aer more the product will doom to extinct soon. No doubt in that. If companies doesn’t manage their brands in social media it is a disaster for them and the same happened for Kingfisher during its recent fleet restructuring.

Need of Hadoop Distributed File System

People would always think how the organizations like Yahoo, Google, Facebook store large amounts of data of the users. We should take a note that Facebook stores more photos than Google’s Picassa. Any guesses??

The answer is Hadoop and it is a way to store large amounts of data in petabytes and zettabytes. This storage system is called as Hadoop Distributed File System. Hadoop was developed by Doug Cutting based on ideas suggested by Google’s papers. Mostly we get large amounts of machine generated data. For example, the Large Hadron Collider to study the origins of universe produces 15 petabytes of data every year for each experiment carried out.

The next thing which comes to our mind is how quick we can access these large amounts of data. Hadoop also uses Map Reduce. It follows ‘Divide and Conquer’. The data is organized as key value pairs. It processes the entire data that is spread across countless number of systems in parallel chunks from a single node. Then it will sort and process the collected data.

With a standard PC server, Hadoop will connect to all the servers and distributes the data files across these nodes. It used all these nodes as one large file system to store and process the data , making it a 100% unadulterated distributed file system. Extra nodes can be added if data reaches the maximum installed capacity making the setup highly scalable. It is very cheap as it is open source and doesn’t require special processors like used in traditional servers. Hadoop is also one of the NoSQL implementations.

The Tennessee Valley Authority uses smart-grid field devices to collect data on its power-transmission lines and facilities across the country. These sensors send in data at a rate of 30 times per second – at that rate, the TVA estimates it will have half a petabyte of data archived within a few years. TVA  uses Hadoop to store and analyse data. Our own Power Grid Corporation of India intends to install these smart devices in their grids for collecting data to reduce transmission losses. It is better they also emulate TVA.

Connecting Informatica and Social Media (Facebook)

Informatica Power Exchange is a data access tool to connect and access enterprise wide data irrespective of the type of databases like SQL Server, Oracle, Netezza, Sybase, Salesforce, Teradata, Green Plum, all kinds of Mainframe data, SAP data, etc,. Power exchange is similarly used to access Hadoop data.

The most interesting thing is using Informatica to access social media data on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Nowadays this happens to be latest real time data. By using Informatica we can collect data from any of the above social media and provide that to sales and marketing teams to leverage the more from the social media to meet their sales and revenue targets.

 Consider the scenario, if a FMCG or mobile company launches a new product, immediately the social media is flooded with the comments and opinions of the people. It will decide whether the product is success or flop in the market. Based on the outcome the product can be tweaked and released as some version 1.1. The management can plan and budget their revenue forecast and profits. The power of Power Exchange can be used along with Power Center to reap maximum of benefits.