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cdixon.org

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11–16 of 16 posts

Re: Graphs

#11

Post by huangm »

dwine wrote: post #9
aamar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter's main innovation was discarding symmetry? This is a common statement that benefits from explicit context: Twitter's innovation specifically was importing the "asymmetric follow" into a social network, a graph in which nodes represent individual people and in which relations are generally public.

What was the social network with public relations between people that failed because the "follow" was symmetric?

Symmetric follow doesn't have to fail for asymmetric follow to succeed. Twitter's innovation allowed them to create and serve new use-cases. That's all

Re: Graphs

#12

Post by mgdiaz »

aamar wrote: post #5
dwine wrote: post #2

I'm a computer scientist, and I call the (very old) study of graphs "graph theory". How is "network theory" different? And is it just me, or is it painful to read this? It has the feel of a student taking an intro course on optimization, then exclaiming, "everything is an optimization problem!" I mean, sure, this is true, but it's tautological and feels forced to me. And sorry, but Twitter's main innovation was disca…

> Twitter's main innovation was discarding symmetry? This is a common statement that benefits from explicit context: Twitter's innovation specifically was importing the "asymmetric follow" into a social network, a graph in which nodes represent individual people and in which relations are generally public.

I agree. It was about building the structure of a social network around the "asymmetric follow," and doing it in a way that facilitated the curated transitivity that Chris talks about.

Re: Graphs

#13

Post by jpeterson »

dwine wrote: post #2

I'm a computer scientist, and I call the (very old) study of graphs "graph theory". How is "network theory" different? And is it just me, or is it painful to read this? It has the feel of a student taking an intro course on optimization, then exclaiming, "everything is an optimization problem!" I mean, sure, this is true, but it's tautological and feels forced to me. And sorry, but Twitter's main innovation was disca…

'Graph' is the next hottest buzzword on the internet, thanks to Facebook.

Re: Graphs

#14

Post by kvs »

dwine wrote: post #2

I'm a computer scientist, and I call the (very old) study of graphs "graph theory". How is "network theory" different? And is it just me, or is it painful to read this? It has the feel of a student taking an intro course on optimization, then exclaiming, "everything is an optimization problem!" I mean, sure, this is true, but it's tautological and feels forced to me. And sorry, but Twitter's main innovation was disca…

I down voted you by accident! My bad.

Yes, it was painful to read and I missed the whole point of the post unless it is just listing of where we find and use "graphs." I think this is a post out of his comfirt zone; I like his VC and startup posts better.

Re: Graphs

#15

Post by kvs »

hooande wrote: post #7

I've definitely noticed a trend towards graph based thinking in recent computer science publications. My half baked theory on this is as follows: Graph based thinking is a result of the rise of social networking. The term "social network" wasn't common until I was a senior in college. Back then most computer scientists thought of things in terms of matrices - rows and columns. After 2004 when facebook became the most…

Perhaps people stopped talking about matrices because social graphs are sparse. Also, most of the time papers (esp. system papers) are written to solve a problem and if the paper proposes a solution to solving a social graph related problem then that's what the author will use because it's easier for readers to relate.
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