Hardware and Software Architecture Required for a Social Networking Site

Requirement

Write a 2 - 3 page paper describing the hardware and software architecture required for a social networking site (such as Facebook or Linkedin). Explain the various user categories and message flows within the social networking site for each user category. Also, explain the benefits and risks associated with the use of social networking in business. Discuss the benefits that organizational monitoring of social media provide to customers and general public. Identify the competitive advantage that social media provide to businesses. Provide an example of an organization that has successfully integrated social networking with its strategic planning.

Solution

Hardware and Software architecture required for a social networking site

Hardware and Software

A bunch of high-tech equipment is required to run a social networking website successfully. For example, Facebook which is the busiest site on the internet has servers with two or more very high speed 64 bit Intel Nehalem processors with 4 or 8 cores. Each server has as much high-speed memory as it can handle, i.e.  It ranges from 256 GBs to 512 GBs of RAM which is linked together into various clusters. Facebook possess more than 30,000 servers.Equipment like Force10 Network's E-Series switches is used by social networks that can handle up to 5 TBps on the backplane with multiple gigabits and 10-gigabit Ethernet connections. The data centers of Facebook contains its web servers and storage units that are located in various parts of America (Kalpan and Haenlein, 2010).

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Facebook uses a lot of software to run smoothly and faster as it serves around 570 billion page views per month, a bulk of photos and videos are posted on it (approx. 3 billion photos every month), more than 25 billion contents in the form of comments, status updates, etc.Facebook is still a LAMP kind of website.Below, we will have an overview of some of the important software used by Facebook to provide the people the world’s largest social network site:

  • Memcached– This software is used by Facebook as well as by many other social networking websites. This is a distributed memory caching system. Thousands of Memcached servers are run by Facebook with tens of TBs of cached data at any point of time.

  • Hip Hop – This software is used to convert PHP into C++ code which is compiled for better performance. This software is highly helpful to Facebook as Facebook heavily relies on PHP to serve content.

  • Haystack – This is used for the storage of photos. 

  • Bigpipe- It is used for optimal performance.

  • Cassandra – It is a distributed storage system. (Pingdom Royal, 2010)

User category and message flow

There are six types of users:
The creator – He creates social media on which he publishes web pages, blog posts, images/videos and share various contents online.
The messages flow from him via the social media to other users. 
The critic – The respondents to the content posted. He posts ratings and reviews goods and services, comments on blogs and forums.
He comments on the posts of the creator thus messages flow from him to the creator and other users.
The collector – The organizer of contents for themselves or others using RSS feeds, page tagging, social bookmarking & photo.
He too is involved in the to and fro motion of messages on social media.
The joiner – The person who joins the social sites like Facebook etc. and maintains a profile.
He sees the messages posted by the creator or critic and thus messages flow to him.  
The spectator – The person who reads blogs and views videos, reads online forums, etc.
As he reads various posts, he responds or comments accordingly thus messages flow both the ways.
The Inactive - The person who is inactive on social media despite being online. He doesn’t post anything or read anything that is user generated content. (Pezaris and Gersh, 2004)

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In this case, the messages (whatever he sees on the social media) only come to him but does not go out from him as he does not participate in writing.
Benefits and risks associated with the use of social networking in business
Social media helps a business to learn about the audience, helps in targeting audience effectively, 
helps in finding new customers, helps in receiving instant feedback from the customer, helps in generating leads, etc.  
Use of social media may sometime result to the risk of spy-ware, hacking, engage in two-way dialogues & potential criticism etc.
Benefits to customer and people by Organizations monitoring the social media  
The monitoring organizations help the people in letting know the positives and negatives of any content available on the social media. These monitoring organizations plays a key role in educating the customers regarding any goods or services advertised on the social media.

Competitive advantage to businesses

The Social media helps the business organization in marketing their products and services, relating to the customers, reduces costs, acts as a forum to hear from people who doesn’t connect through other channels, and in improving understanding of unmet needs for cross and up sell(Aral et al. 2013).
Organizational example that has included social networking in its strategic planning
Ford Motor Company has successfully integrated social networking with its strategic planning. It uses social networking significantly to market its products. The company add blogs, put images and post headlines on its websites. Their blog is named ‘The Ford Story'. The people who are new to the site or who are browsing for a new car get to know about the company and its culture from a social viewpoint right from the beginning (Qualman, 2010). 
The company uses social media for its brand marketing and has significantly included social media into its strategic plan.

References

  • Aral, S., Dellarocas, C. and Godes, D., 2013. Introduction to the special issue-social media and business transformation: A framework for research.Information Systems Research, 24(1), pp.3-13.

  • Kaplan, A.M. and Haenlein, M., 2010. Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business horizons, 53(1), pp.59-68.

  • Pezaris, P. and Gersh, M., 2004. Method and system for controlling access to user information in a social networking environment. U.S. Patent Application 10/793,233.

  • Pingdom Royal. (2010). Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world's largest site - Pingdom Royal. [online] Available at: http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/18/the-software-behind-facebook/ [Accessed 18 Apr. 2016].

  • Qualman, E., 2010. Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business. John Wiley & Sons.

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