Friendster

[The Emperor <the_emperor at m...>]

--- In rdfweb-dev at yahoogroups.com, "Danny Ayers" <danny666 at v...> 
wrote:
> 
> >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.

You could also bypass lengthy form filling when you sign up on forums 
or mailing lists or something. You could have an import FOAF 
information option and you'd only need to fill in your username, 
password and email address (as well as location of your FOAF file, of 
course). It could then match the email addresses (or hashed versions) 
and send and email to the address if they are the same. This would 
send a 'confirm your identity' email with a link to click - if that 
is clicked then the relevant information that the board needs 
(location, homepage, interests, etc.) can be grabbed and used to fill 
in the remaining fields. I'd certainly be interested in something 
like that.
> 
> 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:
> 
You could have an option to alert you if something like FOAFNaut 
found someone who knows you but you don't have on your knows: list.

I also like another idea - simiar to the idea that you can send 
someone your contacts in ICQ. If you had your information on the smae 
sever/in the same database it would be simple to request permission 
share someone else's knows list (you could edit it before updating 
your list) - I've added this to my 'to do' list as it would be very 
handy if you know someone who has a big FOAF file and knows a lot of 
the same people (why replicate the effort?).

A broader idea might be that you could also contact someone who has 
their FOAF information elsewhere and request permission to grab their 
knows: list and if they were OK with that then it would be relatively 
simple to grab that data and that to your database.

As the knows: files are open for all to see it wouldn't be any bother 
to just copy and paste it into a FOAF file but the above are based on 
the information being stored in a database and also I prefer the idea 
or it being a friendly consentual kind of thing which is in the 
spirit of FOAF ;)

Emps