Eventual consistency, yes. What I'm saying is if a few pics disappear for a half hour while things resolve themselves, nobody is going to care... or likely notice.
It's not a bank.
By the way, I believe social networking is mostly bullshit, which is my "LOL" at the "social graph".
Eventual consistency however provides no guarantee of consistency unless it is backed by absolute local consistency on every node. Don't you run into CAP theorem problems otherwise?
Sure. But if a person or a photo data object goes missing ?
Facebook has different data stores for each of their features so I imagine the loss of a person would be pretty nasty as would a photo data object that multiple people have tagged or commented on.
My point is that when you are the size of Facebook, Twitter etc a loss of data in 0.001% of cases equates to a LOT of data and relationships.
Wow.
Whether it is consequential or not is completely beside the point. As is whether you understand the "social graph".