A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Why PLM should pay attention to Facebook Graph Search?

Why PLM should pay attention to Facebook Graph Search?
Oleg
Oleg
22 January, 2013 | 3 min for reading

One of the biggest tech events for me last week was Facebook Graph Search. If you haven’t heard about this, you better to catch up. There are tons of articles about new Facebook Graph search, but service is still in the Beta phase. You can submit for Beta here and hope to get it soon. So, the best you can do for the moment is to read about other people experience. The stories about Graph search are mixing technical, user and business content. Many of reviewers are taking Facebook graph search as a new Facebook monetizing mechanism. You can read Forbes article Facebook Graph Search Runs On Likes That Advertisers Have Already Paid For, which provides a good review of what Facebook announced. You can have a read of the following blog Under the Hood: Building Graph Search Beta sharing some beta experience with Facebook Graph Search. Finally, watch the video with Zuck presenting Graph search as as third pillar of Facebook.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENRaEh_OBbg

Graph Search is clearly technological challenge fro Facebook in terms of scale of data. Here is an interesting quote I captured from Digital Spy article.

Graph Search has been a huge engineering challenge for Facebook, as it involved the indexing of data from 1 billion accounts, 240 billion photos and over 1 trillion connections on the social network, but also factoring in the myriad of privacy settings dictating who should be able to see what. 

Why Graph Search is important for PLM? 

Here is a question you may ask me – why is it important? Here is my take so far on a reason why PLM and enterprise vendors should pay attention on Facebook experiments with search. As we learned for the last decade – scale matters. For the last 10-15 years, the really scalable systems were developed for public web first and then replicated in the enterprise. This trend was different back in 1980s and 1990s when complex problems first were solved in military and defense. What we learned from Google for the last 10 years is that system can scale up enormously. However, Google public web search never faced the problems of privacy, accounts separation and diversity users. Google came to the similar problem earlier last year with injection of personal social results. To me, this dimension of scale is not well developed. Noise vs. signal problem in highly diversified by multiple accounts data corpus is an interesting problem to  work on. Facebook is chasing long tail of all Facebook accounts, likes, connections, etc. This is a level of scale I can imagine in enterprise systems or even value chain of OEM and suppliers. This is where things get interesting.

What is my conclusion? Remember, 3-5 years the question of web scalability was introduced as a serious showstoppers for enterprise systems to scale up outside of corporate data center. Almost nobody is talking about that nowadays. It is clear to all of us that public web powerhouses like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. proved that systems can scale. Facebook Graph is a step in a direction that can be very close to social collaboration in any enterprise company and beyond. Important. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
4 June, 2023

PLM (product lifecycle management) have a reputation as a complex IT project. During my two decades of experience with PLM...

5 October, 2011

Business Intelligence (BI) is a fascinating combination of words. Each time I hear about BI, I’m confused a bit. The...

11 October, 2013

It is not unusual to hear about PLM as a single system capable to drive overall product development processes in...

7 November, 2013

Budget and cost. These are important elements of every IT solution. PLM is not an exclusion from this list. There...

10 March, 2017

Digital transformation is a new trend and manufacturing companies are exploring how to become leaders in a new digital society...

18 June, 2009

Short note following Devon Sowel blog about SolidWorks on Cloud/SaaS plans. This is good continutation to thoughts and discussion started...

18 August, 2024

Summer is a great time to catch up on PLM reading. What is on the top of the mind of...

25 November, 2017

I like Friday evenings. It is a time to relax and make some unusual reading of something completely outside of...

19 February, 2024

In the quest for operational efficiency and innovation, the concept of simplification has emerged as a strong trend across industries....

Blogroll

To the top