Social graph

Rails
1

Hi
I’m trying to build a new facebook app.
I want to keep a database of the friends of friends for each user.
what’s the best way to store and maintain such a graph ?

thanks
Gady

2

Hi Gady,

There was an interesting article in February’s edition on Linux
Journal (166) about Rails and Facebook API integration.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9924

They suggested a few of resources
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Using_Ruby_on_Rails_with_Facebook_Platform
http://rfacebook.rubyforge.org/
http://www.chadfowler.com/2007/9/5/writing-apis-to-wrap-apis

Cheers,
Ewan

3

Gady S. wrote:

Hi
I’m trying to build a new facebook app.
I want to keep a database of the friends of friends for each user.
what’s the best way to store and maintain such a graph ?

I imagine if you have a table of just the friends of each user (columns:
user_id, friend_user_id), you can get the collection of friends of
friends of each user.

Something like:

select
u.*
from
user u,
friends f1,
friends f2
where
f2.user_id = :given_user_id and
f2.friend_user_id = f1.user_id and
f1.friend_user_id = u.id and

Stephan