Friendster

[jamescarlyle <jamescarlyle at t...>]

Sorry, this reply to Leigh's posting bounced so it's being posted out 
of sequence. I'll also take this opportunity to say that I 
vehermently oppose spamming people (and that's why I made the point 
about the negative feedback of SixDegrees users on F***ed Co.), but 
viral marketing is not synonymous with spam. To me viral marketing 
is _just_ a way of building social/information systems that encourage 
people to participate.

> > But what about something slightly less intrusive, such as a simple
> > application that notified an existing FOAF publisher that someone 
else
> > had nominated them as a friend and would they like to reciprocate?
>
> Not sure if this is what you mean, but I'm intending to add 
a "Notify
> Friends" feature to the FOAF-a-Matic Mark 2 which will allow you to
> email those people you're listing as friends to let them know that
>
> a. you're created a FOAF description, and
> b. you've listed them

Partly what I meant. I have created a FOAF document, listing e.g. DJ 
Adams, who I used to eat sandwiches with, but he doesn't list me in 
his FOAF document because either a) he dislikes me :-), or b) he 
doesn't know that I am interested in FOAF and want to be part of the 
FOAF community. My suggestion is an app that looks out for one way 
linkages and suggests the reverse to the "linked to" so that they 
become a "linked from", gently encouraging a more complete picture.

The difference with FOAF-a-matic is that it would be a service 
independant of the creation tool, and that it would only traverse 
within the existing FOAF network, i.e. not send email to people 
outside the FOAF network, in order to limit perceived "spam". This 
depends on how quickly the founders want the network to grow (back to 
my question 0).

James