LinkedIn Engineering | Status Feature
With the introduction of the Status feature, I wanted to take a moment to discuss the engineering behind this launch. Since joining LinkedIn in September 2006, I’ve been helping evolve the communications system into a highly scalable messaging platform. This release is very exciting for us as it builds upon the foundation we’ve put in place, making features like Status possible.
One of the key value propositions of LinkedIn is being informed about what your network is doing. This awareness can come in many forms: what questions are my connections asking? What news is my network reading? Propagating this information out to the LinkedIn network in a scalable manner is a difficult problem, but provides tremendous value to the end user. In order to support this going forward, we began to create a unified service that would provide network updates to users.
We’ve converted our back end to use this new service, and late last year we used the new Network Updates Service to create a time-based feed of the events in your network. We are currently processing over 40 million updates posted daily, which will continue to increase as the network grows. For someone like myself who has recently graduated from university, this is a daunting number, and yet, it’s why I continue to enjoy working at LinkedIn.
To handle this capacity, we use a cluster of ActiveMQ machines for distributed JMS processing, EHCache for fast in-process caching, and an efficient update procedure for when new updates are persisted. We’ve designed the system to be scalable right from the start, horizontally partitioning across multiple databases as growth demands.
We will continue to provide new updates into your feed, and for those of you who do not visit the site regularly, you will be receiving these updates in a bi-weekly email so you can be kept up to date with the latest activity in your network. I would like to thank the team that worked on the Status feature, particularly Scott Schlegel (Web Development), James Lau (Engineering), and Qian Su (Engineering).
If you would like to hear more details our messaging platform, or engineering at LinkedIn in general, I will be speaking at some upcoming conferences along with Ruslan Belkin and Nicholas Dellamaggiore:
- SDWest, March 4, 7:00pm – 8:30.
- JavaOne, May 3-6 2008
- Velocity, June 23-24, 2008, Burlingame CA
And, at the events particularly the SD West Birds of a Feather event, “There Will be Pizza”!
trackback
http://blog.linkedin.com/2008/02/29/launching-statu/trackback/
Carmelo Cutuli March 2nd, 2008
My compliments!
I think that this could be the first step to build a more personalized dashboard, with some intelligent agents scouting LI database and suggesting the most interesting and compatible profiles.
Søren Sprogø March 3rd, 2008
Would be sweet if this status message could be syncronized with other applications, fx. MSN Messenger. Otherwise I really see no point in logging in to LinkedIn on a regular basis just to update it.
Jon March 3rd, 2008
It took 4 people to implement one pretty simple feature? Impressive use of engineering resources.
malcolm March 4th, 2008
I use Plaxo today to sync facebook and plaxo status originating from Twitter.
Plaxo will sync address books with LinkedIN. Will it also sync status?
Dan Keldsen March 12th, 2008
Piping in status from Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook, IM clients, etc. would be awfully nice. Agree with Soren that logging into LinkedIn simply to change status is not terribly likely.
BTW – what is the character limit, and why can’t you warn people IN CONTEXT that they’ve run over?
Mario Sundar March 18th, 2008
@soren sprogo,
Currently there is no sync w/ other IM systems. There is a world of opportunity to collaborate with out there. These are good suggestions… keep em’ coming!
Ben Hamilton October 9th, 2008
Is there some javascript or code that I can insert into my own webpage (i.e. wordpress blog) that can display my ’status’ from linkedin?
Or can I update my status from somewhere else?
This would be very neat as I could update my status once, and have it display in more than one location.
Dan Kolansky December 13th, 2008
Twitter Integration Please! :)
I Second that! Twitter Integration Please!!!!! Someday? April 26th, 2009
And what about a BlackBerry Application??? Everybody else has these except linkedin! I think they are greedy.
James Fletcher May 20th, 2009
Agreed:
—-Blackberry App (There is one for iPhone? I mean really?)
—-Twitter Status integration!!!
Prithviraj Sanakran July 13th, 2009
Hi
That is a fantastic work given the back-ground of the people who worked on this project and the volume the system handles.
I am sure Linkedin will have plans to provide facility to use – Unified Communications (UC) – using open source such as jabber. That will cut down the time to get connected and get their recommendations.
Also you can see people out there while you are also there and many more if you know what this UC is all about.
I will be happy to architect one for you.
Thanks
Prithvi
maureen July 16th, 2009
Any way you can post this near the text box please?
Gareth James September 9th, 2009
As a Blackberry user I 2nd the the Blackberry ap idea – I cannot belive there isn’t one. The mobile web is the future.