1. Scalding is a library that provides a concise domain-specific language (DSL) for writing MapReduce jobs in Scala. It allows defining source and sink connectors, as well as data transformation operations like map, filter, groupBy, and join in a more readable way than raw MapReduce APIs.
2. Some use cases for Scalding include splitting or reusing data streams, handling exotic data sources like JDBC or HBase, performing joins, distributed caching, and building connected user profiles by bridging data from different sources.
3. For connecting user profiles, Scalding can be used to model the data as a graph with vertices for user interests and edges for bridging rules.