Jens-Fabian Goetzmann

Recently René, a friend of mine (and co-founder of the social networking website Metalcon), who is now researching in the context of Web technologies, has come up with a new concept how to efficiently retrieve Twitter-like newsfeeds in social networks, using graph databases such as Neo4j. If you are interested in Web technology in general or social networks in particular, I suggest you check out his article and the enclosed video, since it highlights how database technologies that deviate from the ubiquitious relational databases can be used and leveraged to produce a level of efficiency that is really stunning. To illustrate this, René highlights that with this technology, as much as 10’000 news streams can be retrieved per second for a network that generates 100 new content items (e.g., tweets) per second on a single machine – in comparison, Twitter reported that 600 tweets per second as of last year. This alone should be enough to emphasize the enormous potential of this new technology.