Introducing Graph Search

Re:Introducing Graph Search by phwd on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @01:50PM (#5062039)

I'm torn. On one side I really like it, it reminds me of the old People Search feature Facebook used to have. On the other side for third party developers especially those who try to make the Facebook experience better, I'm afraid this is reinforcing the point you should not build 100% on platforms.

I'm sure there are many who have had this idea or are building this currently. Facebook Heroku templates given for new developers to start with, hit on the four main areas that Graph Search seem to provide.

Another example would be a query like

    movies liked by people who like movies I like

In FQL the closest I would have gotten was

   SELECT name, page_id from page where page_id in (SELECT page_id from page_fan where uid in (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = me()) and profile_section='movies')

And even then FQL was unstable

So then you wonder, why use an app with an unstable query built on an API filled with bugs when I can faster get the result using facebook.com?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Introducing Graph Search by mutual_likes on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @02:17PM (#5062260)

I would be torn too if people used my app, but I like this. Building your own app has it's limits. I built a facebook app to show mutual likes sorted by likes because facebook's pages browser only showed mutual likes sorted by friends. The FQL to do this is slow and unusable if someone has many hundreds of friends and likes. Plus, some friends don't allow apps to query their data, so the result is incomplete.

My feature request would be to allow us to create and share custom FQL and views computed and rendered by facebook. Then, friends don't have to give permission to apps to access their data and facebook runs the query faster.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Introducing Graph Search by hresult on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @05:53PM (#5063651)

“I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Introducing Graph Search by angryasian on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @07:54PM (#5064340)

in your example, look how difficult it is for a company like netflix that has just about every movie you've seen and rated along with everyone else's. Along with friends lists. Now take Facebook who is trying to apply this generalization along multiple categories. Its going to be very difficult to get right.

[ Parent | on HN ]