Apr
13
2008
StumbleUpon – My “algorithm” to deal with friends limit
Posted by Cesare
Categories: socialnetworks, stumbleupon
Comments
I like StumbleUpon. My website gets many visits from there. But as many ( blahblahtech and traffikd ) I have an issue with the friends limit.
Said briefly you can be fan of at most 200 people. After that you get a warning and you cannot add more fans. You cannot even reciprocate a fan of yours. So you are in a kind of deadlock.
I devise this sort of algorithm to deal with such a situation:
- Become fan of a friend
- if he reciprocates fine
- if he doesn’t, persuade him to unfriend inactive people he is fan of
- if he doesn’t reply for a while unfriend him, because he is not active or does not share any interest with you
In Actionscript :)
var limit:int = 2; // weeks for each (stumbler:People in peopleYouAreFanOf) { if (!stumbler.reciprocates() || !stumbler.persuaded() || stumbler.getRepliesWithin(limit) == 0) { stumbler.unfriend(); } else { you.sayThanks(stumbler); you.interactWith(stumbler); } }

As a former programmer, I LOVE the code snippet :) There is a slight optimisation you can apply to the purging of inactive friends – your friends list in StumbleUpon is sorted according to activity. If you scroll down to the bottom you’ll find the person who logged in the longest time ago. Just do a regular purge of people who are no longer active.
I didn’t know it was sorted! Thanks for the information. Honestly I never happened to unfriend people in a social network…