PeopleAggregator - An Open Source Social Network

prostoalex writes "When Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Zaibatsu and Tribe.net just don't cut it, meet PeopleAggregator, an open-source, PHP-written, FOAF-based social network. There's the site and there's the source in case you decide to launch your own. I found out about PeopleAggregator reading this interview with Mark Canter on Read/Write Web today." I wish such sites would provide profile-conversion tools to encourage jumping ship from one to another.

Comments

Wow

[panxerox]

Another (better?) method to avoid coming in physical contact with other people.

Re:Wow

[boarder8925]

Another (better?) method to avoid coming in physical contact with other people.

AIM, Slashdot, and phpBB just were't enough.

Re:Wow

[Canberra Bob]

At least with an open-source community, we will not have our socieities social structures dictated by large corporations. Face it, using the internet as our primary means of communicating is inevitable. We should at least try to keep control of our communication rather than pass control over to some corporation who treats their bottom line as more important than society as a whole.

Re:Wow

[gmuslera]

Geography matters a lot for physical contact, and nothing for virtual.

Re:Wow

[l1_wulf]

Social networks are only as useful as your own perceptions. While not a proponent myself, I've seen valid declarations for and against them (in general), open or closed (to the public), etc. It seems that those that look to them for substitutions for an actual social life are typically disappointed since male to female ratios are nominal at best. On the other hand those that look to these networks as opportunities to meet people (or keep in contact with people) from varied backgrounds and locations who share interests or needs (programming help, contractors, games, etc.) generally have much better luck than say randomly talking to someone in a bar.

If these networks were to try and cater to the lonely hearts out there, they would be no better than dating services, except they would likely prove to be disappointing in that regard, little better than just jumping into any of the myriad chat rooms out there. Perhaps this is validating invitation only networks (ala Orkut), who's to say?

A drawback to social networks is end user propagation and activity. Maintaining, checking, browsing and so on seems, to me at least, like a time consuming activity. One which I lack the desire and the time to follow. I tend to be a bit of a hermit, often times putting my IMs as away just to concentrate on the task at hand while I sit at my computer. I suppose when the "killer" social network comes along, I'll sign up and stay, until then they remain little more than academic interests in a field that is reaching oversaturation and little innovation.

Re:Wow

[the argonaut]

Face it, using the internet as our primary means of communicating is inevitable.

Please tell me where I can get off whatever train you're riding on, because I don't think your world is or will be a very nice place to live in.

75% of the communications I have with people are still good old fashioned face-to-face conversations, and I would venture a guess that for most people the number is not much different. For most people the internet is replacing the ways we would communicate over long distances (phone call, snail mail), but it's not, nor do I think it ever will be, a suitable replacement for real physical interactions. And if I am somehow proven wrong, please shoot me before it happens.

I agree with everything else you said. Developers have already decimated our town squares, traditional shopping districts, and other public spaces and replaced them with malls and other quasi-public areas, where the only speech and the only activities allowed are the ones they deem to be "appropriate". Why should we let them fully enclose our virtual commons as well?

Re:Wow

[persaud]

Unless virtual is prelude to physical.

Re:Wow

[digitaleus]

it's hard to turn something as huge as communication into a scalar.

The most meaningful communication generally happens face-to-face, and this is unlikely to change without some seriously dystopic biotech. However, in terms of the time I spend communicating, much of it isn't face to face, given that I sit in front of a PC all day. Rather, MSN and weblogs commenting forms a large chunk of my daily "chit chat".

Re:Wow

[The_K4]

Well Holograms can help turn internet communication into face-to-face communication. You have a camera(s) and a projector(s) on each end and for both people it looks like the person is standing right there (ok maybe with some of that cool "I can swee right though you" kinda feel).

Re:Wow

[digitaleus]

That's beside the point. Most of like to be in the same room as people, from time to time, even if magical technology makes it unnecessary...

Re:Wow

[The_K4]

I agree. However the grand-parent that I was replying to indicated that most meaningful communication happened face to face and that that was unlikly to change. I'm not advocating replacing face to face communication, just replacing things like phones with a better system.

Looks like

[xSquaredAdmin]

it aggregated too many people.

Re:Looks like

[frenetic3]

Looks like a sausagefest too. Marc? Ben? Roland? Sean?

I need Charlenes here people. Claires. Colettes. Tortured twentysomething souls who lean forward in sleazy web cam shots just to show a little cleavage.

Work with me here! :)

-fren

Re:Looks like

[pollock]

I need Charlenes here people. Claires. Colettes. Tortured twentysomething souls who lean forward in sleazy web cam shots just to show a little cleavage.

I think you're looking for Orkut.

Re:Looks like

[SuperBanana]

?it aggregated too many people.

Friendster's got 'em beat. Their technology is so good, they don't need a slashdotting to go under.

A few weeks back they implemented an emergency "how many degrees of separation do I want people to see" feature, and the default was pretty low. They had to do it because their MySQL database was choking for weeks to the point that you could log in, but any further activity would hang until the applet returned a connection-timed-out error.

Re:Looks like

[Fred IV]

it aggregated too many people.

Without even so much as a GROUP BY

FIV

Re:Looks like

[Anonymous Coward]

Which came first: The Orkut network or the invitation to join the Orkut network?

*cough*

[DarkHelmet]

Slashster

Slashster is an Open Source PHP / Mysql based FOAF.

Congrats to PeopleAggregator for making Slashdot though. Dunno why my site didn't make front page... Heh.

Re:*cough*

[Anonymous Coward]

The pictures of someone (who is presumably the parent poster) actually scared me off. No, seriously. This is not a joke. I don't want to be a part of a hippy social network (although perhaps an Open Source network must, in the end, attract hippies?).

Re:*cough*

[Rick and Roll]

No Kidding. I saw this about a month ago. That is a pretty cool project. And I could have sworn that I got the link to it from your .sig...and on an investigation of your posting history, I realized that I in fact have. I guess you decided not to have your .sig this type, because it would be redundant, because of your message.

Unfortunately, I do not have that many geek friends (or friends at all, really *sigh*), just a few. If I did, I might check it out.

Re:*cough*

[Rick and Roll]

Oops, I forgot. Slashdot doesn't show .sigs when you click Reply. Which makes it really hard to reply to .sigs (I've been guilty of that once or twice).

Re:*cough*

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is a FOAF?

And further... who the hell wants a social networking site/software? Are we all fuckign 12 year old girls now?

Re:*cough*

[DarkHelmet]

Geez, I hope you don't go on chat clients, or dating sites because of the "hot women" you see advertising it. Because if you do, that makes you a sucker to advertising.

Since this is Open Source, very little money goes into the site, so you're stuck with my ugly mug.

If I ever make decent money from this, I'll get a model to pose on the front page... Just for you!

Re:*cough*

[Anonymous Coward]

Its probably hard to see the attraction of a friends network when you have no friends.

Re:*cough*

[Sexual Asspussy]

i couldn't agree more

Re:*cough*

[f-bomb]

at least he had some initiative to get off his ass and create an open source implementation of something proprietary. i had been wanting to run a social network for a particular niche group and extend some of the basic stuff you can do in friendster. now i can do that....

Re:*cough*

[DarkHelmet]

Heh. I've been expecting you.

Re:*cough*

[Anonymous Coward]

I was just saying you had hippy hair and thus I would think that the users of the site may similarly be hippies. Additionally, I saw no other people on the site (perhaps I didn't look hard enough).

And if a dating site had hot women listed as available (and were indeed hot in real life), I might go to it. But really, I'm not interested in dating sites. So I shouldn't have commented in the first place.

Re:*cough*

[Anonymous Coward]

He looks exactly like a drug dealer I used to know.

PeopleAggregator?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, or does the OSS communitity have more trouble naming things the other industries? Seriously. -5 troll anyway.

What's the point ?

[Sonic McTails]

Even though opensource is a good thing, why make it so anyone can install it. If it's not certizilied, it's not going to make many hits or matchs. If it was two people like over /. or a message board, that would be different because you aren't looking for a stranger.

Re:What's the point ?

[Deraj DeZine]

certizilied, adj. sert-ih-ZIHL-eed

Difficult to install and use for the purpose of maintaining screening users by intimidating new users ("n00bs"). See: DEBIAN.

DISCLAIMER: the above comment is a joke. If you do not have a sense of humor, chances are you are currently furrowing your brow in a vain attempt to understand why this is not a direct insult to your beloved distro.

Re:What's the point ?

[cheide]

It doesn't seem to have hurt Livejournal too much. I would imagine most of the cost is in infrastructure and operations, not code development.

The distributed code doesn't necessarily include *everything*, either. It may be functionally complete, but missing various tweaks and optimizations necessary for really good scalability. Then, as people improve the basic released code, they can fold those improvements back into their own code base and gain those features *and* keep their performance advantage.

Re:What's the point ?

[l1_wulf]

See DEBIAN? LOL, I thought Debian was rather easy to install, and with apt-get even easier to maintain packages. IMO, Gentoo is more of a mental workout for installing, but even then only if you're building totally from scratch. It's been years and years since I've bothered with Slackware and other granddaddies of distros, so I can't say whether or not these are easier or harder to install/maintain.

Since I'm already OT, why am I lately compelled to only reply OT? *shrug* Oh well. One has to wonder if actually saying "certizilied" would even be worth the effort of finding ways of using it :P.

Re:What's the point ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. I think you set a record for off-topic-ness =)

Incidentally, I had to have the same argument in my head to decide which distro to mention. My first thought was Gentoo, but I'd get flamed/modded down for that (lot of Gentoo zealots on here). I used Slackware a while ago and, while package management was essentially non-existent, its installation procedure was pretty simple.

Debian has great package management, but its installation process is (was?) long and confusing. And I'm not a n00b!

the wonders of PHP:

[rokzy]

Warning: mysql_pconnect(): Too many connections in /usr/web/peopleaggregator/env_production/lib/adodb /drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 251

Warning: mysql_pconnect(): Too many connections in /usr/web/peopleaggregator/env_production/lib/adodb /drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 251

Session: connection failed

Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/web/peopleaggregator/env_production/lib/adodb /drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php:251) in /usr/web/peopleaggregator/env_production/lib/main. php on line 36

Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /usr/web/peopleaggregator/env_production/lib/adodb /drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php:251) in /usr/web/peopleaggregator/env_production/lib/main. php on line 36

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/web/peopleaggregator/env_production/lib/adodb /drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php:251) in /usr/web/peopleaggregator/env_production/lib/main. php on line 37

Re:the wonders of PHP:

[ChibiOne]

You mean "the wonders of bad programming techniques"

Re:the wonders of PHP:

[justMichael]

That has nothing to do with PHP.

That comes from an incompetent server admin.

Rule #1 for production PHP:
php.ini -> display_errors = Off

Re:the wonders of PHP:

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a link to the source code, download it, compile it and run locally on 127.0.01, damn it.

Re:the wonders of PHP:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but if it was IIS running SQL server set up by an idiot admin....

Re:the wonders of PHP:

[Eberlin]

The wonder here that I'm most interested about is that it uses adodb-mysql instead of PEAR. What's the ratio of ADODB vs PEAR use? Which one's better? They sure make it sound like PEAR is more "official" but I've gotten used to using ADODB, personally.

Re:the wonders of PHP:

[TardisX]

Errr, surely rule #1 is to make sure you allow more mysql processes than maximum apache children?

Is it a common php 'admin' mindset to just hide errors rather than make sure they don't happen in the first place?

Re:the wonders of PHP:

[Anonymous Coward]

This has everything to do with PHP not having connection pooling.

Re:the wonders of PHP:

[panaceaa]

I thought rule #1 for production PHP was to realize your dumb web hack has gone too far and it's time to rewrite it in a production-capable language.

Re:the wonders of PHP:

[justMichael]

The problem is the errors should not make it out of development.

It's depressing how much crap gets spewed to the browser when you run a lot of PHP code at E_ALL and display errors.

In development:
error_reporting = E_ALL;
display_errors = On;

Inproduction:
error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE;
display_errors = Off;
log_errors = On;

The admin should be watching the logs and making sure that any errors are dealt with.

But to answer your question, no, they should not happen, but if one does and it happens to leak the DB password, you are fucked.

Re:the wonders of PHP:

[TardisX]

But to answer your question, no, they should not happen, but if one does and it happens to leak the DB password, you are fucked.

Wah?

If you are letting people connect to your database from the big bad internet, you just about may as well have a blank password!

Ideally, for a DB on the same machine, where the local machine is trusted (no shell accounts) then just don't use one! Setup a trust relationship, and forget about it.

If you have untrusted shell accounts, well, all bets are off anyway.

Re:the wonders of PHP:

[justMichael]

Which is why my servers run with only trusted accounts and the db only listening locally. Yes the site currently is listening publicly, but only until I get finished migrating off the old server and only for one account from one IP. ;)

Re:the wonders of PHP:

[1110110001]

And that's why sourceforge doesn't work. Oh it does .. Maybe PHP isn't that bad. Just because something isn't the way you know it doesn't mean it's bad.

b4n

Re:the wonders of PHP:

[aint]

The password will never show up in any PHP error, ever. Username, it might. Host, possible. But never the password. Perhaps you mean the error will show a filename that contains the password and if some fool uses, for example, plain text files outside of the docroot to store them...well...they sorta deserve the headache ;) I agree about error handling (like not allowing PHP to spew ugly errors) but wanted to make it clear that PHP itself won't emit DB passwords (yes I know it was just an example, but I didn't like the example :).

Nerdy friend connection?

[dealsites]

What ever happened to people meeting at the mall, bars, concerts, school, etc...??

I hate to admit it, but I imagine most of these social-network people are the nerdy type. Not that I'm saying that's bad, but most of us probably already have some nerdy friends. Why not get out and meet people in real life to havae a well-balanced friend social network?

Although the open-source project is cool.

--
These are the deals you can't pass up. Real-time updates on all the best stuff. You won't be sorry! Check out the hot deal search page too!

Re:Nerdy friend connection?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 20something. I'm too old to hang out at the mall.
I don't hang out at bars because sleazy guys, sluts and alcohold and music dont' appeal to me.
I dont' go to concerts because there is no modern music I'd care to listen to and I hate the noise and crowds and rude behavior at concerts.
I graduated school a decade ago.
Also, I work from home 365 days a year.

My human contact, thus, is very limited.

Re:Nerdy friend connection?

[Anonymous Coward]

What ever happened to people meeting at the mall, bars, concerts, school, etc...??

You don't belong here.

Re:Nerdy friend connection?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am like you, but I meet women at my karate school and dance lessons. Just dedicate about 5-8 hours of your time to those activities weekly, and you have a lay for every day of the week.

Re:Nerdy friend connection?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 20something. I'm too old to hang out at the mall.
I don't hang out at bars because sleazy guys, sluts and alcohold and music dont' appeal to me.
I dont' go to concerts because there is no modern music I'd care to listen to and I hate the noise and crowds and rude behavior at concerts.
I graduated school a decade ago.
Also, I work from home 365 days a year.

You sound like a real catch.

Re:Nerdy friend connection?

[Siniset]

dude, i'm the nerdy one in my group of friends (those from high school) and i was the last one to join friendster, and it was only because they were all on it. It's like IMing, it used to be a nerdy thing, now is just a young-person thing...

Re:Nerdy friend connection?

[bcrowell]

Why not get out and meet people in real life to havae a well-balanced friend social network?
Here are a few reasons:

• I work. My wife works. We have two kids.
• There are a lot of nice people in my neighborhood, but we have nothing in common with them.
• There are a lot of nice people I work with, but they all live 40 miles away.
• I like ultimate frisbee, but how do I find people in my area who want to play? The internet was the only way I could find.

Note that meeting people through the internet doesn't preclude following up by meeting them in real life. Just because you talk to people on the phone, that doesn't mean you never see them face to face.

Re:Nerdy friend connection?

[God! Awful 2]

Although the open-source project is cool.

Yeah, with a name like PeopleAggregator it sounds *so* cool. I bet they spent a whole 5 minutes on that one.

-a

Re:Nerdy friend connection?

[bad-badtz-maru]

Man, I hate to break the news to you... but friendster and myspace are filled with totally hot chicks...

think "lets make out - kthxbye! 3". All style before substance.

Reminds me of a joke...

[alan_dershowitz]

hearing about technical people writing "social networking" software.

How do you tell if an engineer is an extrovert?

He looks at YOUR shoes when he's talking.

Re:Reminds me of a joke...

[jred]

Here goes my karma, but that was a good joke.

Sorry, couldn't resist, whore that I am :)

XFN

[cgranade]

An open-source social protocol already exists... not a site, but an XML protocol for marking links as having a social significance. The recently announced Nvu supports links with XFN information. I would love to see if this network supports XFN, so that it could tie into other XFN-compliant networks and sites.

Re:XFN

[Anonymous Coward]

FOAF, for the enlightened ones among us who appreciate RDF's directed graph model

Re:XFN

[pldms]

FOAF (which PeopleAggregator uses, as do many other sites) and it's relation to XFN are discussed here, and in depth by Leigh Dodds. It would be pretty hard to make something like PeopleAggregator using XFN since it's concerned with typing relations, not describing people. FOAF and XFN don't really compete. (btw, FOAF came first)

reviews

[name773]

anybody have a link to reviews of this thing?
or better yet, a personal experience with it

Note to everyone:

[Neil Blender]

You don't need a program, website, or even a computer to make friends.
You just open the door, go outside and...OH MY GOD, the SUN, it BURNS&..&}=20 ]} } } }&..}=3Dr}'}"}[NO CARRIER]

Re:Note to everyone:

[Alrescha]

This reminds me of an Asimov short story: "It's Such A Beautiful Day". A summary gracelessly snatched from the web:

"Twelve-year-old Richard Hanshaw is forced one day to walk to school when the teleportation device in his home, the Door, breaks down. He enjoys it so much he starts doing it every day, driving his teacher and mother to distraction. Eventually, his mother calls in a psychiatrist who goes on a walk with Richard to find out why the boy likes walking to school so much, and the answer ends up being a surprising one."

It's an interesting and perhaps prophetic story.

A.

Friendster and open source

[Anonymous Coward]

A bit OT, but while the friendster code may not be open, sure looks like they love it on the backend

http://www.friendster.com/jobs/

They even use an acronymn, LAMP, to refer to Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/PERL/Python

Re:Friendster and open source

[frenetic3]

sure looks like they love it on the backend

mysql_pconnect(): Too many connections in /usr/web/peopleaggregator/env_production/lib/adodb /drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 251

looks like this site just took it in the backend. :P

-fren

Re:Friendster and open source

[stryck9]

Considering the current site is run on jsp, tomcat and MySQL, I'd say the Friendster folks are pretty happy with open source stuff...

Slashdot Virus? :)

[flaviozilla]

Slashdot Virus? :) lib/WikiDB/backend/PearDB.php:32: Fatal[256]: Can't connect to database: wikidb_backend_mysql: fatal database error * DB Error: connect failed * ( [nativecode=Too many connections] ** mysql://pawiki:XXXXXXXX@localhost/pawiki)

I get too many emails already.

[sulli]

Can someone build a PeopleGoAwaytor (tm)?

Re:I get too many emails already.

[Anonymous Coward]

To quote bash.org:

"I'm going to become rich and famous after I invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet."

Re:I get too many emails already.

[thegrassyknowl]

These have existed since way back.. In the early days they consisted of a very high tech piece of wood. The user simply had to club people with the wood until they went away.

More recently the event of the phased plasma rifle (in the 40W range) has reduced the effort required to making someone go away. In fact, if you have a phased plasma rifle you will need to do very little to make people go away, except for those really pesky ones that can't take a hint.

Don't you love technology? Always making things easier to do.

Re:I get too many emails already.

[don.g]

You mean like Introvertster?

Re:I get too many emails already.

[Saeger]

LOL ( I may be late in hearing about that gagsite, but it made my month. :) Pretty much sums up my feelings about those chatty bitches and their new fad (slashdot FOAF notwithstanding).

--

Re:I get too many emails already.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's meant as a joke, I know... but it's not :( Can't people just leave this girl alone. I'm coding, can't you see.

Re:so what?

[xSquaredAdmin]

>Yeah... and imagine a beowulf cluster of these... Last time I checked, a large gathering of people was called a party...

Re:This passes for news?

[pavon]

Okay... So this is yet another social network. Except it open sourced. Hell, the blurb tells you how many social networks there already are. Why does this pass as news?

Because, since the source is open, we geeks can modify it work in ways the original author never dreamed. Like implementing a social network of one, or creating a network of AI friends. It would also be perfect for modeling the intricate relationships of the cast of ST:TNG. The possibilities are endless!

Could you do any of that with your proprietary invitation only network? I didn't think so.

Steal this book? No, steal this business!

[David Hume]

Steal This Book? No, steal this business!

And programmers wonder why they're unemployed. :)

Listen, this is great. I mean, I like receiving a gift as much as the next guy, but...

I always wonder what people are thinking when they start a business like this and then immediately open source the code and make it publicly available so that anyone and everyone can immediately compete.

Oh, wait. They're going to make their money on support. Or is it custom applications?

And just how do you explain this to the VC? How do you word this on the prospectus?

Re:so what?

[xSquaredAdmin]

Whoops. Forgot my HTML tags.

Yeah... and imagine a beowulf cluster of these...

Last time I checked, a large gathering of people was called a party...

Turn off the computer!!!!!

[b12arr0]

Damn! How hard is it to go meet your neighbors or even leave your room/apartment/house? Is it really that bad? I admit to being a geek and having a love for all things technological but I really don't understand all this whole social networking mumbo jumbo. Makes no sense to me. I like talking to people face to face as much as screen to screen.

Re:Turn off the computer!!!!!

[Tackhead]

> I admit to being a geek and having a love for all things technological but I really don't understand all this whole social networking mumbo jumbo. Makes no sense to me. I like talking to people face to face as much as screen to screen.

I don't understand the fascination with face-to-face either. The graphics are better, but the AI still sucks. When the face-to-face ones can pass a Turing test, I'll play the Blue Room and Daystar Expansion Set. Not until then.

Re:Turn off the computer!!!!!

[b12arr0]

Why am I modded down to Troll? It's not that bad of a comment. I just don't understand social networks. I guess everybody has different ways of socializing. I can understand that atleast.

Re:Turn off the computer!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're funny. But not haha funny.

Re:Turn off the computer!!!!!

[Cajun Hell]

Is it really that bad?

It's pretty bad. It's a lonely, empty place out there, because there's no people. They're all at home, on their computers.

Think FOAF is fluff? It is -- but...

[gregwbrooks]

... but it can be one hell of a business tool, too. I've met people I'd never meet otherwise and gotten projects I'd never have heard about simply by starting up conversations on LinkedIn.

If you're a cubicle rat, then yeah, I guess the whole FOAF thing seems a little too much like high school dating logistics. But if you translate introductions into opportunities and know how to write a compelling message, then some of these social networks are godsends.

Re:Think FOAF is fluff? It is -- but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever used rolostar ? It seems directly aimed at business but doesn't seem have critical mass yet. I'm thinking that hot chics are a key element of getting critical mass, and that an overtly business oriented system may have trouble getting off the ground.

Hmmm. I just looked over linkedin and they seem pretty profession-oriented too.

The problem I have in utilizing these things is that while I have a fairly extensive connection network -- having worked for some companies that produced an unusually large number of employees who left to do great stuff, and also freelancing for a while with clients is disparate industries -- I know of no one who would be interested in signing up at these places. So I can't get my contacts to sign up, and so I join and I'm an island with no connections and no referrals or whatever, even though I am a sort of gateway to a lot of small businesses.

While high-tech, most of the businesses I work for or have worked for are small, and run by conservative or even eccentric older guys who are not about to try out something that sounds slightly hippy-fied, such as an online social network. (None of them have any propblem using Open Source, however.)

Social Networking Experiment

[illuminata]

Anybody want to be my friend :) :) :) :)??? Post below ;)!





... :(

Experiment failed.

Re:Social Networking Experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

This belongs on Something Awful's Weekend Web feature.

Re:Social Networking Experiment

[Bombcar]

I'd be your friend, but I don't trust the illuminati.

Re:Social Networking Experiment

[Xeed]

I will be your friend.... oh, wait...

I can't do that, sorry. It just wouldn't work out between us.

I've seen your past comments, and I'm just looking for someone with a little more karma. Also, your UID is a little too high for my taste. You're just not my type.

It's not you, it's me.

Re:Social Networking Experiment

[Paladin144]

Also, your UID is a little too high for my taste.

Oh man, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard that one....

Re:Social Networking Experiment

[Sensitive Claude]

Is it too late to be your friend?
Sensitive people need all the friends they can get.

Compare to plane fare

[tepples]

What ever happened to people meeting at the mall, bars, concerts, school, etc

Not everybody knows how to drive an automobile. Not everybody drinks alcohol. Not everybody can afford tickets to those few live performances offered at venues friendly to those who either by choice or by statute do not drink alcohol. Some students ride a bus to and from school and thus do not have time to meet beforehand or afterwards.

In addition, electronic FOAF systems are much cheaper than inter-city bus fare or airplane fare for meeting friends who have interests that aren't all that common in smaller cities of 50,000 or so.

Re:Compare to plane fare

[fractilian]

some of us are just plain chickenshits too. :-D

Re:Compare to plane fare

[Anonymous Coward]

I sure as hell don't want to meet those "not everybody" freaks then, do I?

What a stupid arguement.

Re:Compare to plane fare

[kilgortrout]

You had me going til you got to the school bus thing. Can't think of a good reason you can't meet people at school. School is babe heaven. You'll appreciate that after your out a while.

metails.com is better and in same spirit

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm raving a cool place non commercial social network that doesn't have banner ads and the site is intended as a commercial free environment to express yourself creatively and collaboratively among your friends. its new but growing rapidly but its got some really clever / artistic people on it already. check out my blog (and photos) there: jareds learns to blog

MOD PARENT INSIGHTFUL

[Anonymous Coward]

No, seriously. Any way to turn off display of males?

Re:MOD PARENT INSIGHTFUL

[Lord of Ironhand]

Any way to turn off display of males?

apt-get remove mutt

Ehrm...

Re:MOD PARENT INSIGHTFUL

[Anonymous Coward]

How about I:

apt-get remove YOUR-FREAKING-HEAD

Re:MOD PARENT INSIGHTFUL

[Anonymous Coward]

bash-2.05b$ apt-get remove mutt
bash: apt-get: command not found
bash-2.05b$ wtf apt-get
Gee... I don't know what apt-get means...

Six more degrees

[digitalhermit]

I've been carrying out an experiment over the past few months to get in touch with a famous author/mathematician. He's written on the subject and it just absolutely fascinates me. The idea is to send a few letters to friends and see how quickly it can reach the destination through the hops. Theoretically you could get to the author with just six or seven hops. I sent a few letters to some associates but these got only to the third or fourth level before dying out. I'm going to increase the initial broadcast with a different, more academic oriented group this time. Software like the link shows (well, what I got before the ./ing) is almost perfect to track the results.

On a related note, a book called "Nexus" by M. Buchanan discusses social and other networks. Decent treatment, but unfortunately no equations or numbers.

Re:Six more degrees

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been carrying out an experiment over the past few months to get in touch with a famous author/mathematician.

Stop stalking me you freak!

-Douglas Hofstadter

Screw the mods

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was funny. Since Funny doesn't get you karma, please accept this +5, Funny from Mr. Moderator himself,

In case it gets slashdotted

[bluenirve]

In case the site gets taken down:

Damn.

Oh hell. We got slashdotted. And the main site wasn't even running the current code revision. Back in a bit. 19:14CST

oops..

Re:In case it gets slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's offtopic ... who cares? It's funny!

Most posts that are meant to be funny are offtopic. If you don't think it's funny, leave it alone. I for one think this post hilarious. The site really does say this at the moment ... I would mod this funny if I had the points.

If you like this you'll love my new social network

[Anonymous Coward]

I called the VirtualYourMom'sBasement.

The most interesting people ....

[EmbeddedJanitor]

I've ever come in contact with can hardly read or write (some can't do either) and are not computer savvy and don't have computers. It seems to me that internet-based "society" will be as boring, and as socially stimulating as being a white anglosaxon protestant male and attending a white anglosaxon protestant male boarding school. ie. Lotsa self and group masturbation but no clue what the real planet is about.

Re:The most interesting people ....

[a whoabot]

Self/self-group(the group is the self) masturbation for sure. Everyone just ambivalently "holds" everyone else in the group up: everything is always "postive" and weak. It's like the LiveJournal hordes, and if someone posts something that upsets their soft, narrow world-view they delete it immeadiately instead of trying to learn something. This emerging internet society, instead of being the kaleidoscopic meeting of hundreds of cultures as foretold, is just a banal droning of entertainment and pointless discussion.

Re:The most interesting people ....

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a planet?

Re:Steal this book? No, steal this business!

[frenetic3]

The value in friendster is not the technology really -- witness the number of open-source ripoffs (there are several more besides this one, even -- slashster and others have been mentioned) and so on. It's the critical mass of millions of users they've attained.

You can have the slickest and fastest social networking site (or IM client, or p2p client, or "portal"...) in the world but without users (no, being open source is not a "feature", end users don't care), a killer feature/gimmick, or an insane marketing budget, it's useless.

-fren

Amazon

[jmlyle]

Uh oh.

Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cookie

The lawyers got there already.

Full text of the website.

[Raven42rac]

"Damn. Oh hell. We got slashdotted. And the main site wasn't even running the current code revision. Back in a bit. 19:14CST"

Future ideas

[Trejkaz]

So true. And whereas this was an obvious Slashdot Effect joke, there is some insight hidden behind the idea.

Obviously the concept of a social network site where the entire network has to register with one site is going to be doomed to failure in the end.

The first problem is that in order to build a social network big enough to fit everyone interested in being registered on the network, you need a cluster big enough to store every user on the Internet. By my guess, Orkut is the only one with access to this kind of cluster size, because it is hosted by Google.

The second problem is that as soon as you have two social network sites, you have a problem where someone wants to be on both sites. Then you add a third site and you have a problem where that person wants to be on three sites. How many social network sites are there now?

This is the same problem we already see with instant messaging, and is why the newer, more sophisticated IM systems such as Jabber allow the servers to intercommunicate. You can be on whatever server you want, and have contacts on your list who are on whatever server they want.

So here is my idea: distribute the social networks. A user joins the server they want, is allocated a user id which is user@domain.com, analogous to a Jabber ID, and they can add people to their network who exist on other servers.

Communities would work similarly with community@communities.domain.com, people join a community by registering their user ID on the server which hosts the community. For instance, the Slashdot community might be slashdot@communities.slashdot.org.

Now, if all these communities can export FOAF and RDF and agree on how to do any other kind of data manipulation, any program can easily merge cross-site data together to form larger networks if they need, and the work won't have to be done by a single server, it can be done on the client at the user's leisure.

And more importantly, the solution will actually scale.

Who's with me?

Re:Future ideas

[frenetic3]

a friendster or orkut would have no incentive to do this.

their critical mass of millions of members is their biggest asset (and the thing that is hard to acquire -- the tech part is relatively easy; witness all the knockoffs); opening it up to all other comers (i.e. their competitors) would be foolish, just as it would be foolish for AOL/AIM to open up their user base to MSN, their biggest competitor (unless both user bases were equally sized, in which case they would both benefit equally, or the smaller network paid the larger one for access.)

-fren

Re:Future ideas

[TyrelHaveman]

Sounds interesting. I'm too busy reading slashdot all day to implement such a thing, though.

Re:Future ideas

[Trejkaz]

Did anybody say Orkut and Friendster had to do it?

Look at the situation with instant messaging. You say AOL vs. MSN are in competition and will never cooperate, but who cares? Everyone who cares about interoperation can use Jabber, and it works. We have a fully distributed IM system, which works, which AOL and MSN are just not a part of but hey, who cares?

In the same way, every non-Orkut, non-Friendster social networking site in the world could implement this distributive feature, and the distributive nature would work despite Orkut and Friendster not implementing it.

This lack of a feature would eventually draw people away from Orkut and Friendster unless they implemented it as well, which to me sounds like an incentive to implement it. Of course I'm not taking into account that they might be stupid. :-)

The big difference here is that I suspect the size of non-Orkut and non-Friendster social networks is far larger than the size of non-AOL and non-MSN instant messaging networks.

Re:Future ideas

[oliverk]

I agree with you both...FOAF doesn't work without interconnectivity and there's a huge disincentive for FOAF providers to open their network because the positive network effects are the entire reason behind doing this. That, of course, brings me to the open source issue.

The backend code for Slashter and PeopleAggregator are both GPL'd. That's great and very much in the flavor of "information wants to be free." The challenge is that the relationships here are the real information, and until this is all opened up there's really no freedom.

I met with a few MSFT reps to talk about the possibilities of Passport, and one of the diagrams they showed us had these relationships between user id and every connection you would want to make (web sites, email, chat, credit cards, online shopping, bill pay...pretty much all of it). Don't bother with the anti-MSFT stuff...I'm already a convert. But consider the big idea behind it: have one public id and one private id and free us to exchange with whomever we want. That's true freedom from the Yahoo!'s, AOLs and MSN's of the world.

We spend a huge amount of time thinking about platforms and software that we can give away for free but maybe that doesn't really matter. I don't care so much that all of these different open source word processors work...I care that they allow me to fulfill the task at hand and share my work with others. I don't care if I use Photoshop or Gimp, but I DO care if I can share high-quality images with my clients. And I don't care if I use a Yahoo! account or a Friendster account...what I want most is to just connect with services and people and let the rest of this all be transparent. And from my perspective, this sounds like the next big opportunity for true open source work. Replicate Passport, make it bulletproof and use it to power all of these services. Then you finally take away the power from the big corporations.

Of course, funding this indefinitely could be a problem. But you could argue the same thing about Linux...so there's a solution in there somewhere.

Re:Future ideas

[DrEasy]

We use this "community of communities" idea in our P2P file-sharing program, in case you're interested: U-P2P

Re:Future ideas

[SEWilco]

So here is my idea: distribute the social networks. A user joins the server they want, is allocated a user id which is user@domain.com, analogous to a Jabber ID, and they can add people to their network who exist on other servers. Hmm. P2P PeopleAggregator?

If approval is needed for a server to join, then what's being created is FOAF P2P PA.

Re:Future ideas

[Trejkaz]

Ideally you wouldn't need approval for a server to join. You would want a new server set up with the appropriate interfaces to work out of the box, just like any email server can do the same today. I guess you could maintain a blacklist if you're worried about some sort of spam variant.

Re:Future ideas

[dubiousmike]

funding isn't a problem when your end results in one of the most complete and constantly updating tracking databases on earth.

Microsoft shouldn't care how much they lose making passport work because if someone else does it, they will have to pay bank to buy them anyway.

That said, does anyone know of CRM systems that integrate with a web logger that tracks IP and Mac address along with cookie values of some sort (like a user name).

also, anyone know of utlity that can preload content. I mean, as long as there is an internet connection, it can download content to be ready for a browser to be opened? It would be something like what ESPN uses (which only works with IE).

Re:Future ideas

[jrandall]

I believe this is precisely what the Liberty Alliance is working on -- open, interoperable standards for federated network identity. It would be good from the end user perspective if the social networking sites at least started recognizing each other's members by using liberty alliance identities, but I suppose there isn't yet much motivation for them to do that. Eventually they will realize that they are doomed to die of fracturing user bases and be forced to give up on having everyone as members -- perhaps then a macro-network of much smaller community-based networks could emerge, using federated identities and web services to tie them together.

Re:Future ideas

[MooCows]

That's what I told my boss too.

Re:Future ideas

[Alien Conspiracy]

This is precisely what the Mailbox Reputation Network does.

It uses DNS to publish friend relaions between identities in mailbox format ('user@domain'). The is even a hosting service for those without good DNS servers.

Just join the mailing list and start impementing!

Re:Future ideas

[POPE Mad Mitch]

As can be seen discusseed in the 'distributed orkut' group on orkut, i have been work on yet another foaf type project, but with a few differences.

for starters i think that useing email, or email style addresses for user ids is a bad idea, as their either an open invitation to spammers, or you need to have a central repository for the info. So i have been working on using URLs as the unique id. your id then natural leads directly to the information detail who you are and who your linked to, etc. this make forming webs of connected users and sites far easier.

i have attempted to make the rss data file self rendering, but its a little limited, so you can also optionally nominate a site that will render your data and provide a navigable interface, but the viewer is free to choose who does the rendering.

i also have plans for including puplic key blocks and associated data for verification, and restricted access data uses, but havent yet thought of a practical use for it. see the above discussion group for better details.

The main ideas being that the whole system is distributed, and that which cant be purely distributed you get to nominate your choice of server. and that your only requirement to join into the system is that you have access to a website where you can store a static file.

the beginnings of this project can be found on Nepot

Re:Future ideas

[apropos]

>So here is my idea: distribute the social networks. A user joins the server they want, is
>allocated a user id which is user@domain.com, analogous to a Jabber ID, and they can add people
>to their network who exist on other servers.

This is a *very* good idea.

>Communities would work similarly with community@communities.domain.com, people join a
>community by registering their user ID on the server which hosts the community. For instance,
>the Slashdot community might be slashdot@communities.slashdot.org.

Or how about we skip that idea entirely and make the FOAF stuff non-centralized? If the jabber protocol were tweaked slightly (and I'm no expert, this may be impossible or it may already be there) to allow direct connections between users, they could trade FOAF description files.

Think IM meets Gnutella for passing personal descriptions. Searching would be done like Gnutella, through friends (whom you are connected to through your buddy list).

You could even add the Waste protocol into the mix. This would mean that groups could link up in an encrypted way to chat, trade files, or whatever. And if you linked all this to Jabber you would solve the key exchange problem that Waste has by linking a public key with your jabber ID.

Am I making any sense? It's too early for me to tell...

Re:Future ideas

[Trejkaz]

I suspect FOAF queries are going to get built into an extension at some point in time. It just seems to cool to avoid. :-)

Re:Future ideas

[tbarker]

The really worrying thing being that someone could just stick all that data on a removable h/disk, then walk out the door with it. Which is not to say that millions of tiny unsecured FOAF systems would be better. At least you'd only have yourself to blame.

Learn to Dance

[handy_vandal]

What ever happened to people meeting at the mall, bars, concerts, school, etc...??

I'll second this.

I'm a nerdy, basically shy person myself.

Learning to dance saved my social life -- talking ballroom dance here, swing and waltz and foxtrot.

Women go for that stuff, trust me on this one. The fellow who knows how to waltz has got it made. You get to approach strangers, make conversation with them, lead them onto the dance floor, put your hands on them, your arms around them ... move them rhymthmically around the dance floor ... and they love it.

Paradise!

-kgj

Re:Learn to Dance

[Welsh Dwarf]

I'll second that, though my stuff is traditional Celtic, but where I live, you go to an evening (called Fest-noz, or night party in Breton), and you've made half-dozen friends by 2am, generally of the opposite sex (you need a partner for quit a few of the dances after all). It's not even a case of being a great dancer, or takeing someone home with you, it's just a case of doing something together, and having fun. And that's one of the first steps towards a social life.

Re:Learn to Dance

[Angry Pixie]

Women go for that stuff, trust me on this one. I can validate this comment. We do love men who know how to dance, and it doesn't have to be a trendy hip-hop or house style. You can waltz, tango, or practically anything else because it shows you have a cultural side.

But if you really want to earn points:

1. Know something about wine. All men. ALL MEN should know about wine. At least understand the types of wine and how to evaluate a wine's flavor/

2. Ditch the false bravado. Machismo is attractive initially, but it quickly wears.

3. Take an interest in your date. Don't let her walk all over you, but show her you appreciate the time you're spending with her.

4. Be clean. Shave. Use cologne sparingly. Make sure you shoes and your belt match.

5. Be passionate about something. Have a social cause. Love poetry or literature.

6. Open doors for ladies, but don't order our dinners without our permission.

7. It's okay to be a geek. Geeks are sexy. They think about things, but don't brag or act superior because you know more about a subject than your date. Let her know that your geekness includes aspirations.

8. Pay attention to our non-verbal signals. Women average about 150 non-verbal signals every minute.

9. Don't be late, but be forgiving if we are.

10. Above all else, do not end the date with a heart-felt, "Gawd, I'd like to finger you" while escorting your date to her door.

And as a bonus for you college guys: don't do her homework for her, do offer to help tutor her if you'd like to help. And when you take her out on a date, don't take her to see a movie. 2 hours of silence in a theater isn't going to help her get to know you. Take her to dinner - it doesn't have to be a fancy restaurant, but it should be better than a fast food restaurant. If all you can afford is a corner dive, well, tell her. And tell her that you would (and will someday) take her to someplace much better. At least she'll know you're not just cheap, but that you are hoping for future dates. If she is worth her weight in RAM, she'll appreciate the honesty and be understanding without being judgemental. Go for a walk around town. Sit at an outside cafe and have coffee or ice cream. Go browsing through a department store 45 minutes before it closes. Buy her flowers. These are all good things.

Re:Learn to Dance

[Anonymous Coward]

are you single?

Re:Learn to Dance

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like a nice idea - I tried it - be warned people - dancing chicks are kinda scary!!!
They fall into basically two categories - Slightly saggy older sex maniacal ones - and significantly fit virginal young prudes.

Neither are particularly satisfying!

Re:Learn to Dance

[Nurgled]

Make sure you shoes and your belt match.

Whoah....

How exactly do you match a belt and a pair of shoes? What if I don't wear a belt? ;)

Re:Learn to Dance

[StarfishOne]

Wow!

I never thought I'd ever see a woman post dating tips on Slashdot! :D

/mumbles.. guess I've seen it all now

Seriously:

"8. Pay attention to our non-verbal signals. Women average about 150 non-verbal signals every minute. "

I'd like to hear more about this! :)

"Go browsing through a department store 45 minutes before it closes"

Now that is an awesome advice!

/me goes outside looking for a data.
/me runs back: omg! the sun is shining out there :o

Re:Learn to Dance

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't be bothered to register but can't resist replying either.

1) Why? I don't LIKE wine, why would I need to know anything about something I don't like? To 'impress' you?
2) I'd say anything false would wear quickly, bravado, intelligence... knowledge or care for wine ;)
3) Agreed.
4) Always clean, sometimes shaved, the right cologne (see, now if you ask for knowledge about anything, make it something relevant like cologne, too many people walking around smelling like toilet refreshers).
5) Ugh... like every woman out there has a social cause and likes poetry and literature. If that were true there would be less single ./'ers.
6) I hope I'm still allowed to pay, I'm old-skool.
7) If only all women would feel that way.
8) Here's a clue; sometimes we would like the occasional verbal signal as well.
9) Mehe... ya snooze, ya lose. I'm never late and don't like it if others are. Welcome to 2004.
10) Again with the old skool, in general just a kiss on a first date (assuming the date went really well and we both had a great time.)
So in general: everything you ask for are things you would appreciate (I'm assuming you're a woman, Angry Pixie hardly sounds like a male nick)but I sincerely doubt it applies to the majority of women.
The honesty comments are ofcourse very true, but sadly also hardly apply to the majority of the general population, regardless of gender.

~XIII

Re:Learn to Dance

[mu-sly]

Surely everyone is forgetting the most important thing: just relaxing and being yourself.

Re:Learn to Dance

[SilkBD]

It's good to know I'm doing something write... lol

Re:Learn to Dance

[lysium]

Talk about indirect signals. Stuff like 'Aspirations' and 'fancy restaurants in the future' is doubletalk for "You Better Be Hoping For a Fat Paycheck in the Future, because I Sure As Hell Will Be Looking For One."

Crude male behavior (sex me baby) is as big a turnoff as crude female behavior (secure me baby). Sometimes female geeks need pointers, too.

===---===

Re:Learn to Dance

[JaxGator75]

These are all excellent suggestions for making life-long female friends or finding a soul-mate/lover/wife.

The big problem is 90% of geeks are guys and 90% of guys aren't interested in finding much more than a warm body to fake an orgasm.

I hate to generalize, but I'm SO good at it...

Re:Learn to Dance

[JaxGator75]

It's actually 90.0011% of all geeks. Trust me... I looked it up...

*ahem*

Re:Learn to Dance

[ian mills]

1. Know something about wine. All men. ALL MEN should know about wine. At least understand the types of wine and how to evaluate a wine's flavor.

Or better yet, have parents who own a small winery and be able to show her how wine is made. . .
I'm single, any women want to date me?

Mod me funny to go along with this comment. . . http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=102323&cid=872 1210

Re:Learn to Dance

[VanillaCoke420]

But if you really want to earn points: 1. Know something about wine. All men. ALL MEN should know about wine. At least understand the types of wine and how to evaluate a wine's flavor/

I don't drink wine unless it's on some occassion and I'm supposed to. I'm not fond of it at all. Coca cola taste good.

3. Take an interest in your date. Don't let her walk all over you, but show her you appreciate the time you're spending with her.

And even if I don't, I can always pretend I enjoy it. I'm getting rather good at pretending I enjoy some people's company.

4. Be clean. Shave. Use cologne sparingly. Make sure you shoes and your belt match.

Check... check... as for belt/shoes, I don't know.

5. Be passionate about something. Have a social cause. Love poetry or literature.

Social cause? What's that? (Serious question!)
Literature, yes. Poetry, not so much.

6. Open doors for ladies, but don't order our dinners without our permission.

So equality... is it good, or is it whack?

7. It's okay to be a geek. Geeks are sexy. They think about things, but don't brag or act superior because you know more about a subject than your date. Let her know that your geekness includes aspirations.

Wow, thanks for letting me be myself. I can be a geek. Isn't that nice.

8. Pay attention to our non-verbal signals. Women average about 150 non-verbal signals every minute.

And we're supposed to read and understand them all? It's not like you've given us a manual or something, you know.

9. Don't be late, but be forgiving if we are.

So being late is ok if you're a girl? Why?

Re:Learn to Dance

[Angry Pixie]

Oh, you're right on there. In this case I was meaning aspirations in the romantic sense. You want to do something. It's not always about making money and getting power. Many women have more appreciation for men whose goals include trying to make the world a better place. Being an idealistic romatnic is a good thing, and if your date is totally disgusted by idealism in general, then you'll realize it pretty quickly. The fancy restaurant remark is about identifying to your date that you think she is worth more than a buy one get one free burrito at Taco Bell. C'mon, even the geeks out there who've never even touched a girl must surely realize that fast food restaurants stopped being an ideal first date experience in the 60s.

But, again you're correct about the "secure me baby" girls. Hopefully their intentions become obvious before any damage is done.

Re:Learn to Dance

[Angry Pixie]

Was there any truth to that story about how young Bill Gates used to ask his dates what their SAT scores were, and then he'd use their scores to decide whether he wanted to date them again? I'm wondering what percentil he would fall in.

Re:Learn to Dance

[Angry Pixie]

How exactly do you match a belt and a pair of shoes? What if I don't wear a belt? ;)

It's simple. Don't wear a black belt with brown shoes, and vice-versa. There are certain basics to men's dress. Men should always accessorize with a watch and wallet. The wallet, if made of leather, should match the shoes (if made of leather). If you want to make a good impression, and if the dress code suggests it, you should wear a belt. Belts are used to hold your pants up like they were in the 19th century. :)

Re:Learn to Dance

[Angry Pixie]

Social cause? What's that? (Serious question!) Literature, yes. Poetry, not so much.
Be interested in something bigger than you. If you and your date actually have the same interests, then perhaps you two can discuss that. I've wowed some of the CS and CPE majors I've dated by taking an interest in their disciplines. Having an interest in politics, or the environment, or even history, is something because it gives you something to talk about, and it shows that you are not two-dimensional. Two-dimensional really only works if you're one of those rare hetero male-models, or if your date is socially inept. :) What it really comes down to is that you should show that you have interests and concerns, that you're life isn't only about one thing. Now, I'm sounding like Shannon Doherty in Mall Rats

On the flipside, don't be a firebrand preacher about your interests. Politics and religion are pretty risky topics for a first date. See, even the most secure independent minded trash-talkin slashdotting girl wants a knight in shining armor, a Prince Valiant. A Harrison Ford Han Solo... meow.

So equality... is it good, or is it whack?
Equality is very good. Some girls like to be babied to the extent that they don't like being cluttered by indepdent thoughts. The Hilton sisters would be a prime example of this, but she doesn't have to be a poor little rich girl to be like this either. It's okay to put a girl on a pedestal, but don't pamper her unless she pampers you. The last thing you want is to invest all your effort in a cold fish. If she wants to pay for dinner, don't be offended. She has the right to be proud of her financial accomplishments, and if she asks to take you out, don't be alarmed by her liberal heresy, but please at least open the door for her.

Wow, thanks for letting me be myself. I can be a geek. Isn't that nice.
I'm not the only one who says so, Teresa Strasser is a cute TV personality who also writes a singles column (mostly geared toward Jewesses), but it's a fun read for those of us who aren't Kosher:

In Praise of Geeks

I think a lot of those funny slapstick sex farces from the 70s and 80s like "Revenge of the Nerds" really give geeks a bad rap.

And we're supposed to read and understand them all? It's not like you've given us a manual or something, you know.
No, no manual, but in return we give you head. What's the complaint? It's either us or sheep. Besides, some women are so transparent that anyone whose played the Legend of Zelda would be able to figure them out.
So being late is ok if you're a girl? Why?
You get paid more than us, and you get to play pro baseball. Is it so much to ask that we make you wait? Seriously it's not good to make anyone wait, and I try not to, but we are expected to look good for our dates. We have to do our hair, match the right clothing, and that takes time. Now, if a girl makes you wait and she still looks horrible, then you've got a worthy complaint. :)

Re:Learn to Dance

[Nurgled]

Hmmm... interesting. I'm not used to my watch and wallet being decorative! So I'm supposed to buy a wallet for every pair of shoes? :)

Good thing I'm not dating, I guess! I'm obviously hopeless at it!

Re:Learn to Dance

[VanillaCoke420]

Quite honestly I wasn't sure if I would get a reply. Cool.

"Be interested in something bigger than you."

You bet I am. I'm working on an idea that the entire universe is one big pattern of patterns, where subpatterns change, are created, destroyed, and interacting with each other etc. (Yes I'm a bit weird in that I think too much.)

"If you and your date actually have the same interests, then perhaps you two can discuss that. I've wowed some of the CS and CPE majors I've dated by taking an interest in their disciplines. Having an interest in politics, or the environment, or even history, is something because it gives you something to talk about, and it shows that you are not two-dimensional. Two-dimensional really only works if you're one of those rare hetero male-models, or if your date is socially inept. :)"

I'm certainly socially inept and perhaps I interact better with other socially inept people... probably because they know how it is, and she doesn't think it's weird if I act weird or don't want to spend ALL my time with her.

"On the flipside, don't be a firebrand preacher about your interests. Politics and religion are pretty risky topics for a first date. See, even the most secure independent minded trash-talkin slashdotting girl wants a knight in shining armor, a Prince Valiant. A Harrison Ford Han Solo... meow."

Actually I think politics and religion can be good topics. They say a lot about what kind of person she is, and whether or not we can function together (I need all the help I can get in that department, haha.)

"Equality is very good. Some girls like to be babied to the extent that they don't like being cluttered by indepdent thoughts. The Hilton sisters would be a prime example of this, but she doesn't have to be a poor little rich girl to be like this either. It's okay to put a girl on a pedestal, but don't pamper her unless she pampers you. The last thing you want is to invest all your effort in a cold fish. If she wants to pay for dinner, don't be offended. She has the right to be proud of her financial accomplishments, and if she asks to take you out, don't be alarmed by her liberal heresy, but please at least open the door for her."

I'm sorry, but I think it's incredibly difficult to know what women want. On the one hand you seem to want total equality, on the other, I'm supposed to pay the dinner for both of us. Which is it? I do get that point you're making about women making generally less for doing the same job at the same company, so in that case you're probably right. Actually, I'm a liberal and have absolutely no problem of her paying for her part of the dinner or movies if she wants to.

"I'm not the only one who says so, Teresa Strasser is a cute TV personality who also writes a singles column (mostly geared toward Jewesses), but it's a fun read for those of us who aren't Kosher: In Praise of Geeks I think a lot of those funny slapstick sex farces from the 70s and 80s like "Revenge of the Nerds" really give geeks a bad rap."

If I was a bit brusque in my comment I apologize. Anyway, being a geek or nerd is great, and really the only kind of girl I could imagine living together with for a longer time must be a geek as well. A bimbo may be hot in the classical stereotype way and nice to look at, but if I want someone with that one quality, I'd buy a few posters. But, I'm not saying that looks doesn't mean anything, because it does, and it does for everyone. Anyone who says otherwise is either extremely unique or a liar. Some girls say "looks doesn't matter, it's the insides that matter", and then they hook up with prettyboy that has the worst personality, humour and intelligence ever. But, to each their own. :-)

"No, no manual, but in return we give you head. What's the complaint? It's either us or sheep. Besides, some women are so transparent that anyone whose played the Legend of Zelda would be able to figure them out."

Re:Learn to Dance

[jared42]

How can someone with such good advice warrent the sobriquet `Angry Pixie'?

Re:Learn to Dance

[Angry Pixie]

Quite honestly I wasn't sure if I would get a reply. Cool.

I try to reply whenever there's a comment with a question. Besides, this is Slashdot, you shouldn't worry about getting a comment - it'll happen, you should worry instead about being told to fuck off.

Paying for meals is iffy nowadays I think, but I think that only depends on where you are. There are women out there who expect the man to pay for everything. Sometimes I pay, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I pay my half. If I don't pay, I get the tip. I feel less comfortable "going half" on anything like a dinner. It just feels wierd scanning a bill and arguing over who ate most of the appetizer.

About the looks, you have a point. Looks count, and that's why people should clean up for their dates. I personally don't like pretty boys, but I also don't like hairy lumberjacks either. My advice to the ladies is not to date guys who make prettier girls than you do!

Re:Learn to Dance

[Angry Pixie]

Flattery and a few bottles of vodka will get you everywhere!

OT

[Scrameustache]

Why am I modded down to Troll?

a troll is a person who posts messages that create controversy or an angry response without adding content to the discussion

The sentence "Damn! How hard is it to go meet your neighbors or even leave your room/apartment/house? Is it really that bad?" is an angry response that adds nothing to the discussion.

You could also have said "Haha! You people of slashdot are pathetic lonely loosers! I'm better than you!", its the same thing, deep down.

Full Interview Text

[Deraj DeZine]

Ali: Wicked! T'day, I's 'ere wit me main man, Mark Canter an' 'e's 'ere to talk about da PeopleAggregator thing-guh.

Ali: So Mark, 'n' be hones' 'ere, 'ow much poonani are ya 'xpectin' to get offa dis 'ere web site?
Mark: Excuse me, what? I can't really understand you. Is that hemp I smell?
Ali: Fo'real, ain't cha ever been to 'urope?
Mark: You're not even wearing a suit. You look like you're some famous music star or som--
Ali: Thank you.
Mark: I'm not complementing you. You need to go back to journalist school and learn what goes into a good BJ [broadcast journalist].
Ali: Oh, b'lee me. Me knows what cha talkin' about. Respec, man.
Mark: No, I'm out of here. It was nice meeting you.
Ali: So does I get like a invitation in da mail or something? Where you 'eaded, mon? Eh, 'e was a 'tard anyway.

Slashdot, the ultimate social network

[xelph]

One degree of separation. Everybody directly connected to Cowboy Neal. One word and all ready to crash the designated Web site. Sorry, PeopleAggregator...

Re:Slashdot, the ultimate social network

[Neil Blender]

Some foolio did this a while back. Basically, 6 degrees of separation to Taco through your Slashdot friends and fans. He said he got banned from Slashdot for running a beefy script against the site.

Re:Slashdot, the ultimate social network

[pldms]

People have been working on getting FOAF into Slashdot (or at least slash code). There's some information on the RDFWeb wiki. One day the posts will wither away and it will be YA social network site :-)

Re:Slashdot, the ultimate social network

[Three Headed Man]

Actually, that would be two degrees, Me Cowboy Neal You.

hmmmm

[rnd()]

It would be very cool of the Open Source network sites had a way of generating GUIDs for each user and the ability to link together.

Yes making funny comments on /.

[SmallFurryCreature]

Sad bastards who get marked funny on slashdot are well known to have no contact with people let alone physical contact with either sex.

Thank god I am not one of those.

Re:Yes making funny comments on /.

[DarkHelmet]

I'd flag you troll, or informative, or insightful, or flamebait, or anything else that's not funny out of pity, but they took my mod points away when I started pretending that I had a life.

I was only kidding... Stupid mods. I have no life! Come on guys!

Re:Yes making funny comments on /.

[System.out.println()]

Bet you hate those mods right now. ;-)

Re:Yes making funny comments on /.

[francium de neobie]

Is this the newest Karma whore technique?

DDR?

[tepples]

Learning to dance saved my social life -- talking ballroom dance here, swing and waltz and foxtrot.

Is the four-step close enough? Or should I save the DDR for my computer's RAM slots?

Re:This passes for news?

[MisanthropicProgram]

..creating a network of AI friend

Can make her have big tits and call me Stallion?

What about an open source search engine instead?

[ChiralSoftware]

There seem to be too many social networking sites these days. How many can one person possibly belong to? What would be cool is an open source search engine, although I don't know if that project is still active. One thing to consider is that open source works well for "products" like GNU/Linux but does not work as well for services like a social networking site. Even a service like our beloved Slashdot may use open source software but it is a commercially-operated ad-sponsored business.

---------
Create your wireless web site

Speaking about Marc Canter

[azav]

It appears his old baby, Macromedia's Director, just got it's development team dissolved/outsourced/offshored to India.

Don't know what to think.

bastard

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish such sites would provide profile-conversion tools to encourage jumping ship from one to another.

I'm sure you would, because you're a FUCKING RACIST.

me also

[goon america]

I wish such sites would provide profile-conversion tools to encourage jumping ship from one to another.

I wish people would go for the common good against their own best interest, too.

Bad joke...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

... an open-source, PHP-written ...

Good Lord, I'll bet it even uses that PlySkool database, MySQL... It certainly can't be "enterprise" quality... Bahhhh!

What is FOAF

[kevin_conaway]

Since the site is down, could someone explain what FOAF is?

Re:What is FOAF

[Gorilla with a Priap]

Friend of a Friend

Re:What is FOAF

[Gorilla with a Priap]

FOAF documents are, in essence, machine-readable home pages.

Re:What is FOAF

[Cajun Hell]

Foe of a Foe. Don't you want to meet your enemy's enemies? They're your friends, and good candidates for being recruited into your conspiracy.

Zzzz, call me anti-social, but

[KNicolson]

I never really saw the attraction in these. I have many non-overlapping "personal spaces" on the internet, but I've never had the urge to advertise that me here is the same person as me over in the goatse.cx Fan Club. If someone catches my eye as an interesting poster here, and I see the name again over there, I might mail/PM them, but I don't want every lurker suddenly deciding they want to be my friend just because of our shared interest in enormous arseholes.

Livejournal

[Billly Gates]

Great social open source network with tons of communities for about everything.

I am like an adict to it.

Re:Livejournal

[rsadelle]

And if you have a paid account, you can get a page of your friends' friends entries (livejournal.com/users/username/friendsfriends), which can be a good way to find new and interesting people. The emphasis in that sentence is on the "can." In my case, I often wonder why my friends are reading the LJs of these unbelievably boring people.

Re:Livejournal

[Billly Gates]

You use it to make new friends. Hell I have not met any of mine in real person. lol

Sad but its cool.

Do a community search. That is where all the fine is at.

But...

[atomic-penguin]

Is Slashdot not an Open Source Social Network?

--
I didn't read the article so sue me!

Re:But...

[gblues]

No, it's an Open Source Dork Network.

Get it right. Sheesh.

Nathan

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Slashdot not an Open Source Social Network?


It's more an antisocial network.

You clearly have no idea as to who is on these

[metalhed77]

All of the friends and acquaintances I know who use social networking are NOT geeky (but then i have few geeky friends, all of whom don't use social networking). All of the people I know using these sites are totally not geeky and are mostly somewhat trendy if a bit on the counter culture side of it believe it or not. I'm 19 however, and people of my age are significantly more tech savy. Perhaps as you get into older people technophobia creeps in.

Just go on friendster or myspace sometime and you'll notice the fact that most people there are not geeky at all, and that there's probably an even mix of boys and girls.

Re:You clearly have no idea as to who is on these

[Dulimano]

"All of the people I know using these sites are totally not geeky and are mostly somewhat trendy if a bit on the counter culture side of it believe it or not."

You are right. When my friends started their Hungarian-language online social network (wiw.hu) in April 2002, the first 1000 users were those "we know the best parties around" kind of people. They found it fashionable to be on the network. We are now at 51,000 members, trendiness is no longer a topic. But there are still more women on the network than men, 52% to 48%. (And these are not men with female names.) I met many hardcore wiw.hu users personally, and most of the girls are beautiful.

(Note that wiw.hu is not a friendster-like dating site. It doesn't have any matchmaking functionality. Not even photos. So it only maps offline, real-life connections. Currently, about 450,000 of them.)

Re:You clearly have no idea as to who is on these

[Just Some Guy]

I'm 19 however, and people of my age are significantly more tech savy. Perhaps as you get into older people technophobia creeps in.

Or perhaps as you "get into older people", you find a population who actually had to get out and meet people and got pretty good at it. Tell me, why would your average person in their 40s want to join an Internet social network other than for geekiness? At that point in life, either they already have a pretty wide friend network of their own, or they're not going to.

Don't think that older people stay away from Friendster, et al because of a supposed gerontotechnophobia. They stay away because they probably have all the friends they want, or know where to look for more.

Re:You clearly have no idea as to who is on these

[metalhed77]

[sarcastic]
Dear sir,

I'm appalled to hear criticism from the likes of you. You seem like the kind of man who wouldn't even ask a girl's parents for permission to date her! How can you meet a gal without knowing her parents first. Don't you want to know what stock she's from? And don't her parents have the right to know who their precious daughter is interested in seeing?
[/sarcastic]

Differen't strokes for different folks but I think you're just falling back on some romantic notion. You say 'get out and meet people'. As if meeting people was defined by the accompanying social ritual (has to be in person). What of the pen pals of the days of yore? Norms change and contrary to your belief youth culture (once again) is not dragging society into an untenable, apocalyptic, future.

Re:You clearly have no idea as to who is on these

[Just Some Guy]

Differen't strokes for different folks but I think you're just falling back on some romantic notion.

[sarcasm]
Such as, say, that the younger generation has developed a new and better way of doing something, and if older people don't like it, it's because they're afraid of the new system that they can't understand?
[/sarcasm]

I'm only 32, so it's not like I belong to the "get those kids off my yard!" crowd just yet. Although I've played with a few social networks just to see what the buzz is about, I'm just not that impressed. It's not because I'm less tech-savvy than a random 19 year old (think you're into tech now? Wait until you have the money to buy all the toys you've been wanting to play with!). Rather, I like the "old-fashioned" idea of going out and meeting new people.

It's a damn good thing...

[PatientZero]

...email was invented and a widespread standard before the web appeared. Seriously, all the cool new applications on the net are completely fractured, competing with each other for eyeballs to bombard with advertisements.

I can only hope that we, the net citizens, will eventually push back on these mega sites to get some standards produced.

Imagine if each ISP ran a standards-compliant IM server for its users. No more "Do you use Yahoo or MSN? No, oh well, we can't chat." Instead, each IM server vendor would compete to have ISPs install their server but work with all other vendors' products instead of segregating users into disparate networks.

Re:It's a damn good thing...

[Flumph]

Some of us were around before everyone started using SMTP...

AOL, Prodigy, MSN, and many others were email islands, and it was many years after the advent of these "widespread standards" you speak of before they connected.

The existing social networking sites are important proving grounds for user interfaces, features, and underlying technology. But don't worry, social networking will look more like email before too long. Several of the bigger sites are working on exporting FOAF, and once that happens the end-user software will emerge to make much better use of the data.

I'm guessing it'll be less than 2 years (and perhaps much less) before the Mozilla project's client du jour will incorporate FOAF data throughout your email, IM, etc. user experience. It'll become a required part of every communication client, because it'll be so useful.

At the risk of my machine getting crushed just as I leave town for a week, I'll point y'all at my notes on the topic.

ObAprilFools: Your fly's open.

ARRRRGGH,

[migurski]

So here is my idea: distribute the social networks. A user joins the server they want, is allocated a user id which is user@domain.com, analogous to a Jabber ID, and they can add people to their network who exist on other servers.

Communities would work similarly with community@communities.domain.com, people join a community by registering their user ID on the server which hosts the community. For instance, the Slashdot community might be slashdot@communities.slashdot.org.

It's truly wonderful how all these new systems (blog trackbacks, social networking aggregators, feedback forms, instant message systems, etc.) are all desperately struggling to acheive the robust featureset of e-mail and usenet.

Re:ARRRRGGH,

[Trejkaz]

The most important facet of both instant messaging and social networking systems is the ability to maintain a list of users, which neither email nor usenet were ever able to do.

The next most important facet is being able to tell if someone is online. Neither email nor usenet could do that either...

Re:ARRRRGGH,

[tbarker]

Email and usenet are not really suitable for sending around lots of little messages that are feed through an interface, rather than just shown to the user.

Jabber and, possible, SIP (what MSN uses) would be better choices.

Re:ARRRRGGH,

[Trejkaz]

MSN doesn't use SIP just yet does it? I heard they were working on it, but what I see when I sniff the network for MSN traffic doesn't look like SIP traffic.

Re:What about an open source search engine instead

[stryck9]

Nutch is in need of people... Lots of folks are using Lucene (open source) instead of Verity.

Big Geek Carnie!

[Anonymous Coward]

Has there been any attempt to have a slashdot get-together? Like, without computers?
A big geek carnie!

Modding could be an issue though.

too many social networks!

[boomka]

The idea behind social networks is that in theory, when everyone participates in a social network, you can easily find people through your connections.
But once you have so many networks (and the craze is only starting) then even in theory you can't have all your friends on the same network.
At least I know can't possibly be active on all of them.

I think what networks are aspiring to do is unachievable because their scope is so small. We already have our social network, it's called Internet and it is successful because there is only one Internet.

Re:too many social networks!

[burns210]

why doesn't AOL just add a social network plug to aim?

Re:too many social networks!

[Leroy_Brown242]

It'd have to be easily cirmvented by privacy freaks. They don't want the MAN keeping tabs on who thier friends are! :)

Re:too many social networks!

[burns210]

the sad part is, there are those people yet they still use AIM(or similar) which already holds your buddy list on their servers... AOL behind the scenes can already connect all these dots to 30 million or something people(+aim users, ofcourse), this would just give OTHER people the ability to see the 'friend of a friend' graphically... hell, just have AOL put an 'leave me outa this BS' checkbox in preferences and do it anyway.

They have the largest IM/ISP audience and it is perfect to overwelm this new trend. :)

Re:too many social networks!

[Leroy_Brown242]

good point, my friend.
/me switches IM clients . . . .

Missing the point...

[kiwioddBall]

The success of a social networking tool depends on the people that use it - it doesn't depend on whether it is open source or not... If you are wanting to meet different beautiful people I suggest you stay away from a social network where the only people who are going to join are your existing group of friends!!

Re:Missing the point...

[DarkHelmet]

Ideally, yes...

But if this were to say, integrate into a larger organization like a college or university, it would be possible for something like this to be beneficial.

There are also many separate possible implmentations for this... Pretty much any subset of people who are on the net will benefit from an Open Source Friendster style network.

Update

[spellraiser]

Damn.

20:21 Central
While we scramble behind the scenes to put things back together, we'll share the slashdot love and link to other sites where you can get more information about FOAF.

FOAF Info:

• rdfweb.org
• foaf-project.org
• The FOAF FAQ (from rdfweb)

FOAF Tools:

• FOAF-A-Matic
• FOAFnaut (needs SVG plugin)
• FOAF Explorer

Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

19:14 Central
Oh hell. We got slashdotted. And the main site wasn't even running the current code revision. Back in a bit.

Joy of Dance

[handy_vandal]

It's not even a case of being a great dancer, or takeing someone home with you, it's just a case of doing something together, and having fun. And that's one of the first steps towards a social life.

Good points.

You make friends, you have fun.

Sure, it can be part of a courtship ritual -- yes, you might get laid -- hell, you might even get married: I did! -- but all that stuff can seem very secondary, when the dance is swinging just right ... it's a joyous thing to do.

-kgj

PS - Note to newbie dancers: stop worrying about it, nobody is staring and judging. It's not that you're invisible ... but in my experience, people go dancing to have a good time, not to be "better" than other dancers. Even really good dancers! Some of the best dances I ever danced, my partner was a professional dancer, way more experienced than my amateur self ... and she made me feel like I had all the right moves. Go on, try it -- you'll like it.

PPS - THE BIG SECRET: learn to lead. (Talking ballroom dance here -- it's different in some other forms of dance.) It's not really about steps! It's about leading ... which means, the leader decides what to do, and the follower follows. Yes yes, the way a follower follows does influence how a leader leads ... but there's the mystery, my friend: there's no way to explain leading a priori ... you simply have to do it until you get it. And when you do, the world's your oyster, mate!

Re:Joy of Dance

[peterf]

Slightly off-topic, but not entirely: Watch the japanese movie "Shall we dance". A great movie about dance, life and the joy of both.

Six Degrees of Richard Feynman

[gleman]

I've been trying a similar experiment but all tests seem to end at the fifth hop.

Apple style video rant

[EvanKai]

Ze has a Apple style video rant about Friendster that's worth watching.

Re:Six Degrees of Richard Feynman

[digitalhermit]

Feynman? Here's one:

Feynman spoke on the Challenger inquiry. He knew the NASA director at the time. The director is one step away from Kalpana Chawla, an astronaut on Columbia. Chawla is of Indian descent, and knew Dr. Piyush Agrawal, former head of mathematics in Miami-Dade Schools (IIRC) in Florida. My parents have a picture of Dr. Agrawal and Chawla in Washington. My father is good friends with Dr. Agrawal.

On the same thread, the best man at my wedding works at a NASA subcontractor. There are likely at least two dozen direct links to Feynman through him.

A good friend of mine did some work at CERN, though in different eras than Feynman. He's studying physics at likely can follow a few links.

FOAF?

[di0s]

Fart On A Friend?

OT I know, but couldn't resist.

Speaking as a DDRFreak moderator...

[Xhad]

It doesn't help much more than any other video game. ;) http://www.ddrfreak.com/phpBB2/memberlist.php

GODDAMMIT, seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not going to even bother with this if it doesn't yield huge gaggles of gay dick poking and prodding my face/ass regions

Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone place a mirror online, the site 'hangs' BHAHAHAHAHA :))

PHP app... and it scales so well

[Offwhite98]

It is currently offline. I wonder if PHP can actually handle high load.

I do not mean to troll, but I really dislike PHP. I find mod_perl and Java Servlets are such a better option for high traffic sites.

My sugessted possible use for this

[Ozan]

Instead of trying to aggregate millions of users like friendster, orkut, etc. this could be used by companies, universities and other institutions to build a network of their own, where one's individual profile consists of abilities, skills etc. to make it more easy to build a team for a certain project.

Imagine you need someone to implement a special algorithm. Normaly either you or a project member could learn it, you ask random colleagues, or you post a message on a company/university board waiting for someone to hopefuly respond.

With a network like this you could quickly find someone who is able to do it easily and because it is a FOAF / colleague o.a. colleague it is easier to get together since there is a basic level of trust.

Re:This passes for news?

[ogma]

Or like this modification, which I've discussed with my friends ad nauseum:

Each person on the network can give every other person a 'score'. What the score actually signifies is completely up to the people in the network. Now obviously the scores can be totalled for each person and you get a ranking for all the people on the network. So far, pretty hum-drum.

But what happens if you repeat the aggregation round, except this time the score any person A gives any other person B is weighted according to the total score person A got from everyone else. In other words, if your network decided that scores meant 'leadership qualities' then those people who were respected by others as leaders would in turn have more say when it comes to who they think make good leaders. You could possibly repeat the aggregation rounds many times.

Of course, you would have to take care of things such as loops etc., but I get the feeling that if you have a large enough group of people, even if they're allowed to change their scores for others in real time, the system might still be relatively stable.

It's like feudalism in reverse - the end structure is a tree, but the people at the bottom of the tree have the ultimate say on the shape of the tree.

Just imagine the karma whoring!

Does anyone know if something like this has been done? Sites like this one use something like this for mod points and karma (I think), but how about a real-time social network where there are no actual articles being modded, but the other people?

Good For You, Fluff For Me, I Think

[Vagary]

Seems to me like these sites are more useful for managing your social network than building one. Like I imagine you were getting plenty of projects before you joined LinkedIn, it just improved what you were getting.

I'm graduating in a few months and planning on moving to a city where no one I know lives. I'm sure I know some people who know some people who know some people there, but I can't navigate the network casually enough. And without the network, it'll be much harder for me to be so lucky as to have a job lined by by the time I step off the plane. So it'd be really nice if I could just punch all my immediate contacts into LinkedIn or whatever and they'd all do the same, except...I don't think any of them would bother.

So I think these tools are probably awesome if a whole company plugs in, or even a fairly distinct, tech-savvy group (like most of the contractors in a city), but they're not just going to work for anyone. It certainly doesn't help that LinkedIn and all the similar business-oriented sites I've looked at are planning on charging money any day now and don't offer fine-grained locations outside the US (there's a big difference between Halifax and Vancouver, you know).

Or, you can do it in perl

[gagravarr]

Simon Cozens has written one of these. It's called Flox, is written in perl using Apache::MVC (also known as Maypole), and is only 300 lines of code!

Someone Else's Joke: Dear God

[Avishalom]

seen on /. earlier this year
-- Dear Lord, do you mean to say that the rumors of the day star are true !!! --- i am sorry for not quoting the originator, i googlesearched the phrase but nothing came

Learn equality

[Anonymous Coward]

Or proportionality, that means: act same way whether it's he or she. Sex don't mean shit until you're doing it, until then... Women and men deserve equal treating.

See everyone as human first and their sex second. People who adopt roles according to their sex are stupid, therefore masculine men and feminine women are stupid. They forfeit their humanity by pushing their reproductive, that lowly animal role above all else.

Already started

[tbarker]

This is my dissertation project!

I'm writing a p2p social networking tool that operates over XMPP. I already have a working prototype written in Java, although it needs a GUI before it can be of any use.

This site is at http://hearsay.sourceforge.net, but there isn't much documentation so far.

If only they would publish the data using MRN

[Alien Conspiracy]

All these social networks would be much more powerful if they could share data using a system like the Mailbox Reputation Network

You forgot...

[HeghmoH]

11. Feel free to break rules 1-10 when appropriate, because, you know, not all women are the same. Although, if your goal is to get laid rather than form something meaningful, learning to fake 1-10 is probably a good approach.

Re:You forgot...

[Angry Pixie]

Well, different strokes for different folks, and these rules aren't in any particular order. But I don't care how horny your are or how horny she is, if the girl doesn't have a preference for you to be clean and showered, then you ought to rethink your plan. And there's not a single woman in the world who will suggest that you ignore her non-verbal communique.

If you're just looking to get laid, you still need to work on your visual presentation, or you just find someone who's really needing it bad.

Re:Steal this book? No, steal this business!

[HeghmoH]

I agree, it's getting completely ridiculous.

There's a store near my house. Well, there are several, but one in particular is interesting. Half of the stuff they sell is self-replicating! Some of it even comes with everything you need to begin the replication process in the package. The rest has been deactivated, but they're only kidding themselves; you can buy the basics needed to begin replication in a lot of places. Can you imagine; they're trying to sell tomatoes when any fool can get some seeds and stick them in the ground and grow them?

They do offer a few items that don't self-replicate. I can only imagine their business plan is to get people in the store with the self-replicating items, and then convince people to buy the other stuff. A weird sort of advertising. But didn't anybody learn anything from the dot-com era?

I give them another six months, tops.

wine?

[No-op]

most of your suggestions are spot on, but ALL MEN must know something about wine? that's rather off base. there are huge numbers of people who don't drink, so you're making some large assumption that people should know and care what sort of alcoholic beverage goes with what sort of meat, etc.

for that matter, we men don't demand that women be able to differentiate between a hefe weizen and a lager, so maybe you should relax on that one :P

the only member of my family who knows anything about wine is my gay little brother, which isn't a huge motivator to learn more about grape based beverages!

Re:wine?

[Angry Pixie]

I stand by the wine. See, wine is a symbol of class, and knowledge of wine is a sign of elegance. Beer, however tasty, does not show refinement. All men should have a suit and tie. Yes, if you live on the beaches of Hawaii, you'll probably never wear a suit, but you ought to have one. You don't have to be a wine drinker in order to know something about wine. It's about making a positive impression and not commiting a social faux pas in front of a date, or perhaps worse, a client or potential employer/business partner.

gons

[mausmaki]

I can't wait until GNU One Night Stand comes out

What about us married with children types ?

[LouSir]

I have not had the chance to look into these social networks but they sound interesting and may be beneficial to me. I'm a little different then most of you. I'm staring square into the dubble barrel shotgun of 40 years old. Got a wife and 2 little kids and a more then full time job. Try meeting people with similar interests. There is no time. All our (family) social interaction is spent trying to find similar families so that we can all socialize meaning they must have at least one kid and I need to get along with the husband and my wife with the other wife. What then are the odds that this person also has an interest in computers and gadgets and motorcycles ? What about those of us just looking for friends not dates ? Do we count ? Gator

Re:What about us married with children types ?

[georgeha]

Whereabouts do you live? I'm not yet to 40, my motorcycle almost runs, but I got kids.

Re:What about us married with children types ?

[LouSir]

I live in sunny south FL. Great riding whether now. Too bad I'm inside reading an Ars article about Gnome 2.6 . Gator

Re:This passes for news?

[orkysoft]

You should read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow.

Re: What about us married with children types?

[lysium]

Suburbs, right? They are not designed for childraising, not socializing, and now you are feeling that design flaw. If you do not already have such friends, or if one does not happen to live next door, you are basically screwed.

What does your area have for community groups? See if there is a Computer Club or Linux User's Group (LUG) in your area. Or if you are really in the boonies, save up some cash for a convention in a major city. If you go to a convention start-to-finish and attend a seminar or two, chances are you will make alot of friends that you will keep in touch with when you return home.

It will not help find you friends for a Saturday Night, but in our American society it is sometimes the only solution.

====---=====

Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

ARE designed for childraising. You get the idea.

That's right. Deal with institutional racism...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

...my modding down anyone who points it out.

a social network site with a cool photo feature...

[jersey07106]

For all you digital photographers out there, I thought you would appreciate this. I've found a pretty cool website that allows you to share your photos online without much of a hassle. http://www.multiply.com What I like about this site is that you actually create a permanent online web presence for your photos. Instead of you sending a url that has your photos displayed and making people log in just to see your photos, people can just go to yourname.multiply.com and click on photos to see what you've got. It's very cool. This site has other features geared to the online social networking community but their photo display feature is simple and easy to use. It's definitely my favorite feature. It seems like you can upload as many photos as you want and the display qualities are great (photos are very large compared to the other sites I've tried). You can even select a border for your images (like a frame). Right now you can't order prints but I think it's a matter of time before that feature will be available (at least that's what it says in the Help section). Check it out. I think some might be pleasently surprised. I sure was.

So what we need is...

[davburns]

A protocol that can connect different social sub-networks. Even if the information exchanged between two services was limited to the intersection of their individual schema, the greater network would still be traversable (Assuming all of the networks support at least a list of "friends.")

Problems with this idea include cross-site authentication (If I want information pertaining to multiple sites, but have them appear as the same person in the global network), and various forms of spam. Of course, there are lots of people who _want_ some seperation in their various on-line personas. (Eg, dating versus professional contacts.)

Yeah, I know... I'm posting this way late so probably nobody will read it. Oh, well.

great riding weather in upstate NY, too

[georgeha]

if you have an electric vest, windshield and raingear. That's where I'm at. Good luck finding compatible couples.

Groups and cliques

[Scrameustache]

Has there been any documented cases on social networks of "cool people", small groups that slightly larger groups of people wished would make them their virtual friends?

I'm wondering if the communities are being designed to promote, fight or ignore these things.

Googling FOAF

[danimlp]

FOAF:

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.