Babbleknot New Features

This was originally posted on the babbleknot.com blog.

The babbleknot.com team has been gulping diet rockstar & busy adding new forums and features. Currently the board is loading at the rate of about 4,000 new forums per day, with a goal of 150,000 boards during the beta. Just now over half-way there with 78,184 forums loaded.

I continue to be amazed at the variety of boards out there, and the activity that still occurs, even with the popular web 2.0 destinations. I was a fan of King of Queens, but below is a thumbgraph of an entire board dedicated to Leah Remini. Anything is there. You just have to look. In the graph below, the "green" lines are indications of direct replies in threads, which is a clue to relationships between members.


We'll crank up the search & daily indexing rates in the future. Right now, many graphs are done on demand or at the rate of 2,000 per day in a background job. Babbleknot is running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2, with plans to add servers for spiders, large graph layout, and other types of large scale analysis as demand increases.

The new features are key milestones that I am happy to finally check off. Here they are in my perceived order of significance.

The biggest new feature in my opinion is background generation of graphs. Before, if you clicked a forum link & the data was unavailable, the board was parsed while you waited, hourglass clocking, driving you crazy. Now if the data isn't on hand, the generation is pushed to the background. Most complete in 30 seconds or so, but a large board with lots of content & posts will obviously take longer. The forum names appear on the right sidebar immediately & will change to a hyperlink once complete. Sending the generation the background is good for both usability & the overall performance of the site. Right now the requests are persisted for the current web session, but the thought is we will keep that history for a short time so you can go back a bit.

Second new feature is an RSS feed of the recent graphs page.

Finally, image flagging is now in with very basic functionality. Clicking the red flag next to content image will remove the image from view on subsequent retrieves of that graph. It's possible entire forums should be flagged. To me, flagging isn't necessarily bad. I believe there is a large segment of the population that would probably like to surf only the flagged content & boards. This will eventually become part of the Safe Search feature, which I think I'll brand as an opposite, like Wreckless Search.

More updates coming soon. Please post questions and comments if you love or hate babbleknot.com.