A Taxonomy of Social Networking Data. At the Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh this week, there was a conversation on social networking data. Someone made the point that there are several different types of data, and it would be useful to separate them. This is my taxonomy of social networking data. Service data. Service data is the data you need to give to a social networking site in order to use it. It might include your legal name, your age, and your credit card number. Disclosed data. This is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on. Different social networking sites give users different rights for each data type. And people should have different rights with respect to each data type. As we continue our conversations about what sorts of fundamental rights people have with respect to their data, this taxonomy will be useful. Understanding Web Operations Culture - the Graph & Data Obse. -John Allspaw, Operations Engineering Manager at Flickr & author of The Art of Capacity Planning One of the most interesting parts of running a large website is watching the effects of unrelated events affecting user traffic in aggregate.
Web traffic is something that companies typically keep very secret, and often the only time engineers can talk about it is late at night, at a bar, and very much off the record. There are many good reasons for keeping this kind of information confidential, particularly for publicly traded companies with complicated disclosure requirements. There are also downsides, the biggest being that is difficult for peers to learn from each other and compare notes.
John Allspaw recently created a WebOps Visualizations group on Flickr for sharing these kinds of graphs with the confidential information removed. Similar traffic drop on Last.FM seen on the right Google saw a similar drop as well Was it because everybody went to Twitter? Chris Harrison's Project Page. Chartle.net - interactive charts online! CentERdata. DVN - Homepage.