Real-time twitter recommendation: online motif detection in large dynamic graphs

We describe a production Twitter system for generating relevant, personalized, and timely recommendations based on observing the temporally-correlated actions of each user's followings. The system currently serves millions of recommendations daily to tens of millions of mobile users. The approach can be viewed as a specific instance of the novel problem of online motif detection in large dynamic graphs. Our current solution partitions the graph across a number of machines, and with the construction of appropriate data structures, motif detection can be translated into the lookup and intersection of adjacency lists in each partition. We conclude by discussing a generalization of the problem that perhaps represents a new class of data management systems.