We sent out a bunch of invites to Pownce last night and lots of new people signed up. Yay! More people on Pownce!
However, more users = more problems for our poor database.
The biggest problem ("problem"?) with more users is that they have more friends and more fans. There are lists of friends and fans all over the place on Pownce. And behind the scenes there are many places where we need to get these lists.
Today I went through the UserProfile model and added a bunch more methods for getting friends and fans. We call the reverse relationship of fans "feeds" (as in syndication). I don't like calling people "followers" - it's creepy.
So here's what the Pownce friends stuff looks like now.
I'll add better SQL limit (pagination) stuff later and Python alphabetization (is alphabetization a word?). Any other optimization suggestions?
When it comes to online social networks, I think about the good advice of my college friend Charlie.
I've realized that friend relationships are the most important part of Pownce to display correctly. It's quite disturbing to find that your friends have disappeared or that your friend/fan counts aren't updating properly. I'm doing the best I can to keep all the friend functionality working well on Pownce.
I'm still a bit amazed by how much we value our online relationships. Really, we're letting a bunch of geeks manage our social lives?
As a side note my friend Charlie is now a Product Manager at Microsoft.
