This is the fourth installment of the podcast, "The Social Networking in the Middle East."
ポッドキャスト、中東のソーシャルネットワーキングの第四弾です。
Ben Zhao: That’s a difficult question. I think there’s a lot of issues local to the region, and some of it’s economic, a lot of it’s political, and so, you know, I don’t understand what some of the challenges might be for an ISP trying to grow into that space.
I do know that there are European ISPs that have local access points in the Middle East, so potentially, Egyptians could use a phone line, make a long-distance call, dial up to a European ISP and get access that way. Of course the downside is that the cost of doing such a thing is much higher and probably not practical for a traditional citizen in the region; long-distance phone calls or dial-up is relatively expensive.
Steven Cherry: And also dial-up would have a pretty poor network performance on top of all of that latency that you were talking about traveling across the ocean a couple of times.
Ben Zhao: And locally, as I understand it, the capacity of local network links is not quite the same as, for example, what we might expect in Europe or even in South Korea, especially South Korea actually or in the U.S., and so capacity-wise, you know, a large volume of traffic would cause a lot of congestion, which in turn would cause a lot of delays. So that would also dampen the experience for users in social media.
Steven Cherry: Now I think in a recent paper you’ve argued that that latency issue at least could be addressed by partitioning a network like Facebook. Is that right? And how would that work?
Ben Zhao: Well, so we’re not actually quite proposing partitioning—actually we’ve tried partitioning social graphs like Facebook in the past, and it’s actually proved to be very difficult. The social graph is resilient unlike anything else we’ve seen.
I or what we did try to argue was that by placing certain servers—augmented servers, if you will—locally in a particular region, you could speed up some user interactions.
What we found was that even though the world is very much a small place, and most social users have lots of international friends, there are still quite a fair bit of local interactions, you know, between users in the same town, between users in the same city or the same country.
So it would make sense, for example, to locate some local servers, place some local servers in a particular region and to have them target those type of “local” interactions. And in that sense they wouldn’t necessarily have to change the entirety of how Facebook or Twitter might work, but it would basically target specific local communication and make that faster.
And then essentially there would be some potentially small sacrifices in terms of consistency, but ultimately I think as Facebook and other social networks, as their users grow to be more and more international, those kind of sacrifices will probably have to be made sooner or later.
Social graph:This term comes from the graph theory, in mathematics and sociology, and what it does is to map everyone and the relations to one another.