MySpace Has Built Its Own Recommendation Engine, And They're Open-Sourcing It

As social networks continue to grow in size, recommendation engines are becoming a more vital part to each of them. So vital, in fact, that MySpace has built its own.

Called Qizmt, this internally-developed framework was created by the Data Mining team at MySpace. You can see it in action right now with the “People You May Know” feature. But soon, MySpace plans to roll it out to other areas of the site for recommendations soon. More importantly, MySpace plans to open-source the technology for anyone to use. They made the announcement today at the Computerworld Conference in Chicago.

From a technical perspective, MySpace explains it as such:

What makes Qizmt unique is that it was developed using C#.NET specifically for Windows platforms. This extends the rapid development nature of the .NET environment to the world of large scale data crunching and enables .NET developers to easily leverage their skill set to write MapReduce functions. Not only is Qizmt easy to use but based on our internal benchmarks we have shown its processing speeds to be competitive with the leading MapReduce open source projects on a lesser number of cores.

MySpace says it has published the code for Qizmt today. They also note that they have recently open-sourced MSFast, a service they built to help developers track page load performance.

Rival Facebook has been doing a bit of its own open-sourcing recently. Last week, they opened up Tornado, the platform that help to power FriendFeed, which they recently acquired.