Slashdot Mirror

There was also http://www.buddyzoo.com/ which appeared around the same time. It's no longer available, but it was started by a group of CalTech students where it allowed you to upload your AIM buddylist and type in any screenname and find out how many degrees of seperation there was. One drawback was that AIM only allowed a maximum of 200 buddies (or was it 150 back then?) and often times I had to delete people who I no longer chat with much to put in new people.

It was also nice cause they group people together called niches or something like that where all the people inside shared a common set of friends.

This sort of thing is not new, in fact it has been done before. Buddy Zoo has been around for at least 3 years and does the exact same thing; although, the algorithm may be different (I have not checked) the idea is exactly the same.

BuddyZoo

here it is: http://www.buddyzoo.com/

There is this web site called buddy zoo which proves that all you have to do to get thousands of people to willingly give up their buddylists is to allow them to make fun pictures with it.

I'm going to buy tin foil for a new hat now.

-CPM

Buddyzoo already does something like this. You upload your AIM buddy list and it draws connections between people by seeing who has who on their list. It rates your popularity based on how many people have you on their list and makes note of cliques (when a group of people all have each other on their list). It even generates a nice SVG diagram to show how the people on your list are linked with each other.

Is it really possible to spend five days talking about an image format no one has ever used?

BuddyZoo has a nice use for SVG, you may have heard of it somewhere. I don't like the Adobe SVG Viewer but the Apache Software Foundation's Batik project is good for turning SVG into a nice (albiet big) PNG.

java -jar batik-rasterizer.jar FILE.svg

Although you might have to futz around with the svg code generated by to get it to work with Batik. Run it through an XML validator to see what I mean. (There is top level <svg> but two closing </svg> so delete the one that isn't at the end.)

If you remember the /. story on buddyzoo, the guy who did that is half responsible for this. And he lives upstairs from me :)

Seems like Adam D'Angelo is also the coder of buddyzoo . Anyone know if he has a homepage?

although smarterchild beats buddyzoo, budyzoo still pulls in at the 100th percentile with a popularity rating of 76. http://www.buddyzoo.com/popularity?target=buddyzoo

Stupid AOLers.

n.b.: Privacy statement

and buddyzoo too

If you look at this visualization of the results, this all starts to look a bit bizarre. Almost every single screen-name in that graph is nonsensical gobble-di-gook. I know for a fact that AIM screennames aren't all like that.