Legal Niches

Facebook has unveiled some of the details of EdgeRank, the algorithm the popular social media site uses to display relevant content in user's News Feeds.  To avoid overwhelming a user, Facebook's News Feed displays only a subset of stories generated by that user's Facebook friends.  At the highest level, the EdgeRank formula is pretty simply.  Each item that appears in a News Feed is considered an "Object."  Whenever another user interacts with an Object you generated, that interacting user creates an "Edge."  Each Edge has three components which are important to Facebook's algorithm:  (1) affinity - a score which measures the relationship between the viewing user and the Object's creator, determined by how frequently the two users Facebook message each other and check each other's profiles; (2) importance - the weight given to each type of edge, such that a comment is more important than a "Like," for instance; and (3) age - the older an Edge is, the less important it becomes.  The higher an Object's EdgeRank is, the more likely your Object is to appear in a particular user's News Feed.

Foursquare has reached one million users.

Each weekend, E-Commerce Law Briefs provides a brief summary and commentary on recent legal news affecting e-commerce businesses.