[rdfweb-dev] Friendster

[Danny Ayers]

>I think FOAF is viral already - it just lacks the strong incentives to
>drive uptake. It's viral in the sense that to get listed in someone
>else's FOAF file you really ought to create your own, thereby doubling
>the number of FOAF files. But what's the incentive to get listed in a
>friend's FOAF file? What benefit do I derive from being there? With
>the Hotmail viral thing you got an email service, with FOAF you get...?

Good point, I can only think of the foafnaut.

>Once the cool, useful applications are there, such as trusted bulletin
>boards, apartment lettings, resume postings etc then people will adopt
>it. Not to say that what's already out there isn't cool, it just isn't
>useful for the majority of people :(

There are places where the data could be usable without much effort, for
some of the kind of things that cookies are used for now like filling in the
forms for posts to blog comments. This should be easy enough to set up : the
user types in their nick, and this is used to collect the rest of the data.
But unless there were a lot of fields in the form it wouldn't help much, and
setting this up to work from something other than a centralized server could
be tricky.

One other aspect of the virulence could (has been?) extended, the exchange
of knows: fields - so if John says he knows Mary, Mary's foaf can easily be
updated with a reciprocal knows:

(btw, I still haven't got any friends in my foaf data but that's not down to
the technology - when time permits I'll try the personality tests danbri
posted ;-)

Cheers,
Danny.