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WTF: the who to follow service at Twitter

Gupta, Pankaj, Goel, Ashish, Lin, Jimmy, Sharma, Aneesh, Wang, Dong, Zadeh, Reza·2013·Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web

Abstract

WTF ("Who to Follow") is Twitter's user recommendation service, which is responsible for creating millions of connections daily between users based on shared interests, common connections, and other related factors. This paper provides an architectural overview and shares lessons we learned in building and running the service over the past few years. Particularly noteworthy was our design decision to process the entire Twitter graph in memory on a single server, which significantly reduced architectural complexity and allowed us to develop and deploy the service in only a few months. At the core of our architecture is Cassovary, an open-source in-memory graph processing engine we built from scratch for WTF. Besides powering Twitter's user recommendations, Cassovary is also used for search, discovery, promoted products, and other services as well. We describe and evaluate a few graph recommendation algorithms implemented in Cassovary, including a novel approach based on a combination of random walks and SALSA. Looking into the future, we revisit the design of our architecture and comment on its limitations, which are presently being addressed in a second-generation system under development.

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Metadata

Authors
Gupta, P., Goel, A., Lin, J., Sharma, A., Wang, D., & Zadeh, R.
Venue
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
Publisher
ACM
Published
2013-05-13
Pages
505-514
OpenAlex
W19684845
Cited by
461
References
28
FWCI
36.05
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: WTF: the who to follow service at Twitter. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/2488388.2488433
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Gupta, P., Goel, A., Lin, J., Sharma, A., Wang, D., & Zadeh, R. (2013). WTF: the who to follow service at Twitter. Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web. https://doi.org/10.1145/2488388.2488433

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