Blog Posts From Active Product Development Tagged With realtime

Amazon Features Active.com in Whitepaper

guest — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 17:31:58 GMT

A few months ago Amazon contacted me about our usage of Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), a messaging platform that enables topic-based messaging between applications. At the time we were one of the biggest consumers of SNS, and they were curious about what we were doing with it. I pointed them to http://realtime.active.com and explained our realtime architecture to them. Intrigued, they showed a few of their engineers and later decided to write a whitepaper about Active.com Realtime and SNS.

Now, finally, that whitepaper is available on amazon.com. Check it out at http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/active-com/. Here's an excerpt:

Active.com was looking for a way to analyze a user’s click-stream in near real-time to deliver pertinent trending information in a timely manner. One of the fundamental ways that Active.com enhances user experience on its website is by understanding and anticipating user needs- surfacing relevant content dynamically to users whenever possible. This is reflected in the “Popular Near You” feature on the homepage, or the “Events Near You” feature on the channel pages, such as active.com/running.

I've gotta give props to Kevin over at Amazon for driving this whole thing. And of course, I've also gotta give props to the two guys who built Realtime, Brian Levine and Rob Cameron!

Active Realtime Trends

guest — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:58:59 GMT

The Active.com Realtime website has now been collecting data for several months. This is the first time we've looked at site usage with respect to a user's location, and it presents the opportunity to do some insightful data analysis.

For example, did you know on average San Diegans register for events within 3 weeks of the start date, and they tend not to travel very far. When they do travel they tend to go to Los Angeles. ; But, people from the east coast often travel farther. For example, when registrants from Philadelphia travel for an event, they often go to Salt Lake City. The trend of east coast people traveling further than west coast might be explained by the weather; the west coast simply has weather more consistently suited for endurance events, and a greater number of events taking place. How do people in the middle of the country fare? Using Las Vegas as an example, top destinations are split between Sacramento, Atlanta and Jacksonville, showing a wide variability in destination.

We also looked at the most popular time of day registrations were completed. For almost all of cities, the morning hours between 8 and 11 were most popular, with an additional spike in activity around 8pm. Evening registrations were especially prevalent in the city of Seattle; could it be all the coffee?

Finally, the registration sport was detailed per city. Running and walking events were found at the top, with cycling and triathlon trailing close behind. Other sports such as swimming, fitness and adventure racing also ranked among the top.

Active.com Realtime - Phase II

guest — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 23:01:10 GMT

We launched Phase I of Active.com Realtime in order to prove a few concepts - namely A) that we could create an extensible infrastructure that efficiently taps into the activity happening on Active.com and B) that there was interest in this sort of thing. Before we launched, we knew the technology was sound, but we were pleasantly surprised to the positive reaction external and internal audiences had to the prototype. So, we embarked on Phase II with the aim of improving design and incorporating different types of data.

I'm happy to announce the availability of Active.com Realtime, Phase II at http://labs.active.com/realtime. Active.com Realtime is to showcases what people in a given city are searching for, registering for, and the results their viewing on active.com right now. The goal of the site is to help you make a decision about what event you might like to participate in by showing you what's popular in your area.

Here's a screencast explaining Active.com Realtime's features:

Active Realtime

guest — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:27:02 GMT

Active Realtime is the newest addition to our product incubator labs.active.com. Every day thousands of people are searching and registering for things to do at Active. The idea behind Active Realtime is to provide a window in to actual user activity, giving a sense of whats happening right now at Active. We also aggregate popular activities on a local level, which reveals favored events and activities in a region. We also have the opportunity to look at trending topics over time, which will perhaps yield new insight into what is keeping us Active.

Presently data for Active Realtime is provided by our newly launched search engine . In the future we hope to include realtime data from other parts of Active, such as event registration openings or community posts. Keeping this in mind, we designed a technical infrastructure for Active Realtime that would allow us to add additional sources of data in the future, as well as allow other applications at Active tap into the information.

To accomplish this, we used XMPP Publish Subscribe, an addition to the venerable IM protocol. Using XMPP PubSub, we are able to keep Active.com Search and Active Realtime loosely coupled, so each service can be independently maintained and scaled. Additionally, we developed a Search Logger, which acts independently of the Search site. The Search Logger acts as the Publisher, and pushes search data over the XMPP bus. Any interested part of the Active infrastructure may subscribe to receive these updates, and the Realtime application is just that. The Realtime architecture includes a Ruby daemon that acts as Subscriber, registering an interest for search activity and receiving data accordingly. This data is recorded into the Realtime database, which then can be displayed on the Realtime site. A diagram showing the architecture is included to the side.

The payoff for investing the time to create this architecture, rather than just querying the search infrastructure directly, is twofold. First, it provides a simple and scalable way for future datasource additions to be made to the Realtime application. Secondly, it de-couples realtime with each of the data publishers, allowing all systems to function and scale independently, without having an impact on one another.

I hope you enjoy this window into Active. The data on Active Realtime is generated by Active users, so perhaps another like minded person will help you to find a great local activity to participate in.