It's interesting that Josh Kopelman submitted this.

The request is harvesting data from Facebook. For users with a tremendous amount of data, batch requests must be made, so it can take a while sometimes.

I can't say authoritatively for Python, but Twisted is probably what you need here (I have used both Node and EventMachine to do things like this, and I'm pretty sure Twisted is similar). The event reactor model will let you defer the request while it's doing things like performing external IO, so your application is freed up to handle other requests in the meantime.

Firefly fits in perfectly with the North Inc. (and Dan's) mentality, I love it:

--1. Address an outdated market: customer support for enterprises. Business doesn't need to be sexy.

--2. Make money now, not later. Sign up, pay now. For those willing to send an email, there's a demo available.

--3. No need to accept funding. North Inc. pushes products. Period.

--4. All the while, they're all still in school learning philosophy, finance, management, and much more.

Congrats to North Inc. on a successful launch. I can't wait to hear the numbers and read the many articles.

Thanks! After spending the summer building the product, we're really excited to publicly launch Firefly. Your comment definitely captures our mindset - how many times do you call into a customer support line today and it just sucks? We think support is ripe for disruption and being able to see your screen instantly makes the lives of customers and reps that much easier.

Here at GraphMuse (invite engine for Facebook apps), we hadn't heard of a "Growth Engineer" until we really looked into some of the people interested in our product.

Turns out that Growth Engineers are actually respected "higher-ups." You said it yourself too. That said, I think few people are familiar with this job title outside of SV.

Was it Facebook who started this trend?

NOTE: I'd increase the line spacing on your blog, it's a bit tight.

Yes it was Facebook who started the trend as early days of the Facebook platform trained many of the best growth hackers in the Valley. 'Dan Yue' at Playdom, 'Joe Greenstein' at Flixster, and 'David King' at (Lil) Green Patch were a few Facebook pioneers. But, it was 'Sean Ellis' (Eventbrite, Dropbox, Xobni, Catchfree) who Originally coined the term.

That's true hardly a few people are familiar with this job title outside SV. I myself being a startup addict from India came across this title one night and couldn't stop dreaming the very moment 'how to be a growth hacker*.

I'd love to contact some of these people as "Growth" is the focus of what I'm working on. Do you know any of these guys you're referencing?

Can I shoot you an email? Mine is tony at graphmuse.com

Sure you can. Shoot me an email on akshay@sugardoctor.in

I am presently working for this company in reinventing their business model for the scaling/ growing up of operation.

And yeah the guys I'm referencing, neither I know any of them nor they know me.

Of course!

Facebook provides you the user's list of friends, and each friend's list of mutual friends with the user. From there, we construct the friend graph, and then run our clustering algorithm on it.

You're right about Facebook not providing friends of friends. Supposedly they used to back in the day, but not anymore.

Makes sense, thanks! Didn't realize they provided mutual friends.

Great service, did a great job on my list of friends. I would love to use this, but having to send over user access tokens is a little scary, even over HTTPS. Have you guys considered licensing this? Would be cool as a heroku plugin...

First off, thank you.

We thought about licensing it, and we'd probably feel comfortable doing so. However, the infrastructure required to run this is pretty intense and customized. We're actually pushing a patent for the infrastructure/technology behind it.

How might we incorporate GraphMuse into the news feed?

I don't quite follow.

What do you mean by a 'list?' A Facebook list?

We might include that as a neat little tool in the near future for those interested.

What are your thoughts?

You should definitely do this.

Ok, we will :)

yes, a facebook list.

your clusters were perfect lists of family, different groups of friends who knew each other, my wife's family, etc.

If you'd like to brainstorm, feel free to shoot me an email at

tony@graphmuse.com

I have some ideas that are worth developing. In fact, we were using GraphMuse originally to determine entire fraternities and sororities. We listed 3,400 Greeks at UPenn in 3 weeks.

Feel free to check out Greekdex.com

or read about it here:

http://www.thedp.com/article/2012/02/new__directory_launched...

I really appreciate your kind words, thank you.

Are you a Facebook app developer? Are you interested in purposes other than sending invitations?

We've always wondered about this. We didn't think people would pay for something like that.

What about a way of creating all your G+ circles based on Facebook friend clusters as well?

Yeah, I don't think many people would pay for something like that.

Katango basically provided that service for free, but they got acquired by Google. http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/google-acquires-katango-the...

I don't think people who are using social media for personal use would pay for it, but people who are using it for business might.

Maybe pricing that works out so it is free for general users and has a low price point for "pro" users?