Sometimes the biggest changes are transparent. Such is the case with Tim Ferriss Common Connections v3 that basically displays what v2 displayed, but is now powered by a real back-end.
There are a few reasons to go to this much trouble.
- The new API based approach should help scale as I collect more data from other podcasts and podcasters.
- The Graph Database also helps to scale, but in addition will open the door for new types of analysis (eg graph walks, graph embeddings, etc).
The downsides are the additional costs and some complexity (although old approach would have gotten very complex if I had tried to scale it). I also had to scrap the auto-complete for the search… at least for now.