I'm planning on creating a social network and I don't think I quite understand how the status update module of facebook is designed. Hoping I can find some help here. At algorithmic and datastructure level, what is the most efficient way to create a status update mechanism in a social network?
A full table scan for all friends and then sorting their updates is very naive and costly. Do we use some sort of mechanism based on hashing or something else? Please let me know.
P.S: I'm not talking about their EdgeRank algorithm but the basic status update. How do they find and fetch them from the database?
Thanks in advance for the help!
