Four short links: 16 December 2010

Compressing Graphs, Authentication Usability, Extreme Design, and Rails Geo

  1. On Compressing Social Networks (PDF) — paper looking at the theory and practice of compressing social network graphs. Our main innovation here is to come up with a quick and useful method for generating an ordering on the social network nodes so that nodes with lots of common neighbors are near each other in the ordering, a property which is useful for compression (via My Biased Coin, via Matt Biddulph on Delicious)
  2. Requiring Email and Passwords for New Accounts (Instapaper blog) — a list of reasons why the simple signup method of “pick a username, passwords are optional” turned out to be trouble in the long run. (via Courtney Johnston’s Instapaper feed)
  3. Extreme Design — building the amazing spacelog.org in an equally-amazing fashion. I want a fort.
  4. rgeo — a new geo library for Rails. (via Daniel Azuma via Glen Barnes on Twitter)
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