TrackBack and Social Network Tools

Popdex can now act as a TrackBack ping endpoint. This is cool, and it's a natural extension of what TrackBack was intended to do: rather than forcing robots to follow links, or programs to scan referrer logs, the software creating the link can instead tell the site to which it is linking about the link. In this case, you can now tell Popdex when you are linking to something, rather than forcing it to find out on its own (by crawling your pages).

It strikes me that a central service like Blogdex/Popdex/etc, which is already doing a lot of work with determining online social structure via link patterns, could take TrackBack usage one step further.

One of the problems with tools like TrackBack threading and More Like This from Others is that running them in realtime is just not very realistic--they take too long to run, and they put too much load on the server. But a service which is always running, always crawling the web and building link relationships, could build such structures in the background as it's working, and then serve up cached versions of those structures. It's equivalent to a search engine like Google building an index, rather than performing a linear search across the entire webspace each time you submit a query.

For example, hooking up MLTFO to such a service might look like the following: whenever the crawler finds a link, it runs a MLTFO query against it, extracting TrackBack metadata and finding any related links. In the process of doing this, it could reuse cached MLTFO data for each of the links that it finds. This would speed up the overall process of building MTLFO lists; and retrieving them could be done in constant time, since the entire structure could be built once and saved.

I don't know the core details of how these services work, so the above may be rather unrealistic. But I think the concept is valid--after all, the data behind MLTFO and TrackBack threading is link relationship data like these services are already harvesting, but pulled from TrackBack threads, rather than through following links.