Calculating unique social networking system users performing an action on a social networking system object

摘要

A social networking system generates one or more metrics describing user interactions with objects to describe the popularity of the objects among users. Data describing actions performed by social networking system users on objects stored by the social networking system to identify an action, the user performing the action and the object on which the action was performed. Stored actions performed on a selected object are retrieved and a subset of the actions is generated by sampling the stored actions at a sampling rate. A number of unique users included in the subset is determined and used along with the sampling rate to determine the number of unique users included in the retrieved actions, which is used to derive a metric describing user interaction with the selected object.

主权项

1. A computer implemented method comprising:
storing action data in a social networking system, the action data describing actions performed by users of the social networking system, each action associated with a user identifier and an object identifier; retrieving a selected object identifier associated with a selected object; retrieving action data associated with the selected object identifier, the retrieved action data identifying actions performed by users of the social networking system in connection with the selected object and communicated to at least one additional user; sampling the retrieved action data at a sampling rate to generate a subset of action data associated with the selected object identifier; determining a number of unique user identifiers associated with the selected object identifier based on a number of unique user identifiers in the subset of action data associated with the selected object identifier and based on the sampling rate, the unique user identifiers uniquely identifying users interacting with the selected object; generating a metric associated with the selected object identifier based on the number of unique user identifiers associated with the selected object identifier, the metric based on the sampled subset of action data generated in less time due to the sampling than it would take for a metric to be generated based on the retrieved action data without the sampling; and storing the metric and an association between the metric and the selected object identifier.