As social networks continue to grow in size, recommendation engines are becoming a more vital part to each of them. So vital, in fact, that MySpace has built its own.
Called Qizmt, this internally-developed framework was created by the Data Mining team at MySpace. You can see it in action right now with the “People You May Know” feature. But soon, MySpace plans to roll it out to other areas of the site for recommendations soon. More importantly, MySpace plans to open-source the technology for anyone to use. They made the announcement today at the Computerworld Conference in Chicago.
From a technical perspective, MySpace explains it as such:
What makes Qizmt unique is that it was developed using C#.NET specifically for Windows platforms. This extends the rapid development nature of the .NET environment to the world of large scale data crunching and enables .NET developers to easily leverage their skill set to write MapReduce functions. Not only is Qizmt easy to use but based on our internal benchmarks we have shown its processing speeds to be competitive with the leading MapReduce open source projects on a lesser number of cores.
MySpace says it has published the code for Qizmt today. They also note that they have recently open-sourced MSFast, a service they built to help developers track page load performance.
Rival Facebook has been doing a bit of its own open-sourcing recently. Last week, they opened up Tornado, the platform that help to power FriendFeed, which they recently acquired.
Quick survey, who still uses myspace?
The TechCrunch demographic is much different than MySpace’s so doing a survey here wouldn’t tell you much of anything…
Yet to create a account there.. in Asia, atleast in India Orkut is still the famous and Google rules here.
I do…I love MySpace…and the new format is really great. I love it because it caters more to performers…I’m a singer and will be putting my music out there real soon!!!
Facebook pulls people off their site if you are a performer and want to let people know about your music. B.J. Thomas (the guy singer/songwriter.. you know ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head”. Not me…I’m the female version)…got a message from Facebook threatening to pull him off if he had too many followers.
I don’t believe they will do that on MySpace!!!
my space is a good platform, i like it and using,
open source its good)
Hope the developer community will be able to benefit from Qizmt, as well as enhance and extend it. Generating friend recommendations through Qizmt would be a new trend among the social networking sites. Also MySpace released MSFast as open source for tracking the performance of Web sites.
This is not a recommendation engine although one could build a recommendation engine on top of this technology. This is more in line with Apache’s Hadoop project which is an open source inspired version of Google’s Map/Reduce system.
This is totally cool! It took me many months and liters of Mt. Dew to build our recommendation engine and would have loved this to learn from…
MG
It’s not a recommendation engine, that’s just one possible use for it, it’s a MapReduce system very much like Hadoop only better of course.
This story is much bigger than you realize, oh well.
Why in the world would somebody build a Hadoop clone to run on Windows boxes? The point of things like Hadoop is to take advantage of an army of cheap boxes. Even assuming for a moment the performance under Windows is just as as good under Linux, your dollar per unit of computation is going to be a fair bit higher.
open source based on closed source. thts hilarious …
i hope data mining team over myspace know this : http://lucene.a...che.org/mahout/
and which will for obvious reasons will be far better than some .net open source.
Could the argument have been made that MySpace has been *hindered* by being on Microsoft? Who wants and open sourced .net app?
The title and the article is plain wrong – they are not open source any recommendation engine, just a map/reduce framework for .net… Yawn
this is not a recommendation engine, just yet another implementation of the MapReduce framework, of which there are a lot of implementations already out there: http://en.wikip...Implementations
The ‘obvious’ reasons are not apparent to me. Care to elaborate?
Is everything so inherently bad if it has a “Microsoft” branding on it? What if it were Apple?
I’m not taking away from the Apache projects. I am a big user of Hadoop/Mahout and they are great. But, they are NOT tuned to run on Windows clusters. This is a native .NET implementation DESIGNED to run on windows.
So again, what makes Hadoop inherently better? Your ‘logic’ escapes me.
What is wrong with you people? How can anyone put a bad spin on this with statements such as “MySpace has been hindered by being on Microsoft?”
Does it matter what platform they are on? They developed something in house – something most companies don’t do – and they are releasing it opensource to the world.
Facebook, LinkedIn and tons of others use Hadoop – is that an argument that they are “hindered” by their use of Linux, because they cannot use Qizmt?
In reality, whats to stop MySpace from using Hadoop. Nothing. They simply choose to write their own system and thats actually pretty cool.
I bet the people who are saying that this is irrelevant, or a hindrance of the MS platform, or that .NET sucks, or MS sucks are just trolls. They probably aren’t even developers, just the “cool kid on the block” who thinks everything Microsoft sucks.
The only person who has a valid point is @William.
Qizmt is not a recommendation engine. It is an implementation of MapReduce. They run their own recommendation on top of that. They did not open source their recommendation engine.
what editor is that? gmail or twitter it
@sn0n / are.zee.dee@
How about perkpipe then? Its a online recommendation engine on today’s social web.