Chapter 8. Building a simple social network

This chapter covers

  • Users and statuses
  • Home timeline
  • Followers/following lists
  • Posting or deleting a status update
  • Streaming API

In this chapter, we’ll cover the data structures and concepts necessary to build a system that offers almost all of the back-end-level functionality of Twitter. This chapter isn’t intended to allow you to build a site that scales to the extent of Twitter, but the methods that we cover should give you a much better understanding of how social networking sites can be built from simple structures and data.

We’ll begin this chapter by talking about user and status objects, which are the basis of almost all of the information in our application. From there, we’ll discuss ...

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