We are currently experiencing difficulties with the ingestion of content. We are working on a solution and aim to have new content on Viewsflow as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
Viewsflow’s performance hasn’t been up to scratch over the last week or so. In our eagerness to deliver better content and rankings for our users we got ahead of ourselves. We gave Viewsflow indigestion and our devs have worked tirelessly to cure Viewsflow of the indigestion.
I’ll outline the changes we made but first some background.
2 weeks ago we boosted (quadrupled) the incoming content. This shone the light onto several issues, which were not apparent at lower content levels. This ranged from standard load issues along with somewhat unexpected issues with our content classifiers. Tossed into the mix was the random failure of one of our servers (something that I could have done without at this particular point in time).
The improvements are on-going as we adjust and tune. We are now in a better position for some the great features we want to implement over the coming months.
We implemented a new realtime feed ingestion system over the weekend of Saturday 16 January 2010. Unfortunately, with the realtime ingestion came a flood of new data overwhelming our processing capabilities which caused Viewsflow to go down.
We are in the process of making updates to Viewsflow to better manage the torrent of information from our new realtime ingestion and bringing in some more omph to our processing capabilities.
Viewflow may suffer further intermittent outages while we implement the changes, so please bear with us.
We calculate your influence rank using a range of measures
1. We look at the links that you recommend to your networks and analyse the content and context of those links
2. We look at how well the rest of the world views that content. Did other people believe it had an impact? Did other people tweet that link (or best of all retweet you?)
3. We look at whether you discover / recommend items early, whether you amplify links found by others or whether you are a bandwagon-jumper (nothing wrong with that).
4. We qualify your activity against your normal measure of activity and the levels of activity on a given subject.
We weigh these factors up and come up with an influence score on a per topic basis. From this influence score we build a ranking, and that allows you to say that, ta da, you are the 3rd most influential person on a given topic.
We recalculate these rankings frequently, more than once a day. Our plan is to increase the frequency with which we do these calculations.
Another week passes and Viewsflow continues its rapid evolution. This week we are rolling out some asked for features as well as lots of behind the scenes work to lay the foundations for future developments including an iPhone app.
Key developments this week are:
For our alpha users it will be easier to find content and other users who share similar interests.
If you are interested in testing out the service and joining our alpha, please do so here.
You can also follow our twitter feed which will push our interesting business and economics stories each day.