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Rate Your IM Popularity
aicrules writes "The internet has long been a safe haven, and thus a play-field-leveling force, for the less socially adept to create a network of friends to share in fun, games, and conversation. However, it appears as if the influence of the social ladder is creeping its way in. While it will certainly lend itself to the abuse that any online scoring system faces, AimFight is the new place where people can go to check their popularity against others." From the article: "Your popularity is based on who has you on their buddy list. There's a complicated algorithm at work here. Your score is measured to the third degree, in the sense of the 'six degrees of separation' game that seeks to link anybody on Earth to any other person through no more than five friends. Say a couple of your friends, A and B, have you on their buddy lists. A, who has three people on her buddy list, doesn't add much to your score. That's because she doesn't have as many people on her buddy list as does B, who has 16. Your friend A is clearly not as well-connected as your friend B. Not unlike life."
Just plug in the screen names.
So if we're supposed to be getting away from this, what's with the Friends thing on /. ??
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
just curious.
highest score i've seen so far is in the 20,000 range.
Dang, and I thought online no one knew I had no friends.
So who's going to win this?
Why, the zombie hackers of course. I imagine that their ICQ buddy lists must be light-years long.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Outside of 13 year olds, Who the hell gives a flying fuck about their IM popularity?
This fight is for people who aren't technical and are in the US. I score very low because most of my friends (and their friends) are on ICQ.
I read the internet for the articles.
I have no friends whatsoever. At least not human friends.
AmISnotOrNot ?
I guess those high school bullies really did peak in high school.
I'm incredibly popular by this measure, and one of the jerks who tormented me is a virtual unknown!
Karma, it can be a bitch.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Oh never mind, I'm not 12 anymore.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Everyone knows that popularity in real-life is based on whether you're on the football team and how many girls have held still long enough for you to nail them!
Now would you like fries with that?
As in many things in life its quality not quantity that counts. Having 100 blithering idiots on your friends list, who also have a 100 blithering idiots on theirs doesn't score in my book. In fact its a net negative versus having 10 people who have a clue and have something to say, because the 100 idiots can bug you all day every day and are just wasting your tim.
@de_machina
myspace being bought out, the growing popularity of all these online "social networking" sites (read: online ego jerkoff sessions, basically) and now this?
Ugh. More & more 'tweeners that don't know squat about computers except how to click & install Napster and AIM.
I'm saddened at what the Internet has become.
I was going to give up my old ScreenName to get a better one...
but I'm thinking with a score of 18245, I should sell it on eBay instead
On my system it says something about "stuff that matters" in the upper right corner of this site...
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
It's only for AIM, doesn't take into consideration MSN messanger, Yahoo, ICQ, RendezVous, Jabber or any other protocols. I'm sure i'd fare better than 1780 on MSN.
A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.
It's run by AOL anyways, so I imagine it's all secure and such...
Foxed Design
If you look at the bottom of the page, it is owned by American Online. I'm pretty sure they have full access to the AIM database =) This "news" post seems very much like an advertisement to me.
So, just on a whim, I decided to see what things were more popular:
apple (6293) vs orange (7389)
coke (3830) vs pepsi (4274)
snoopy (10653) vs garfield (3791)
and finally...
bush (2884) vs freedom (1422)
bush vs iraq (1241)
bush vs democracy (3)
and most telling of all
bush vs decency (0)
Not A Sig
that'll be corrected in the dupe
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
There's a complicated algorithm at work here.
Translation: "We're not really sure how we got it to work. Basically we just randomly fiddled with things until we got an acceptable output." Much like the time-test C programming technique of adding/removing * and & to pointers until it works.
It seems to me that A should add more to my score than B does, because A is more selective as to whom she considers her friend.
It's like being A-listed (pun intended).
This will be wildly scewed by people who use IM for work. In my experience, most workplaces use MSN but I am sure some use AIM. I have dozens of workmates grouped by their functional area. According to this, I am really popular. THere are people here at work that have 100s in their lists, since they are on my list does that make me cool?
their Spammish AIM position!
sigs, as if you care.
An interesting note on BuddyZoo and degrees of separation -- it was created by one of the creators of Synapse, the other co-creator being the creator of thefacebook.com, with whom I worked on a small project several years ago.
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
Sounds a lot like www.buddyzoo.com, which has been around a Real Long Time now.
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.
IM has become an ESSENTIAL part of my work. We pass code snippets, ask each other design questions, and even share pieces of screenshots ("I'm seeing something really weird. Here is a shot showing the anomoly" etc...)
IM has the advantage of being slightly more immediate than email, yet can be freely ignored if you're busy with something else. When you're concentrating on something important and someone sends an IM, you can just hit ESC and close the window. That's a bit more difficult to do with a ringing phone...
Also, IM has the advantage of automatic logging. Everything I send or receive is logged on my PC (with the option for manual deletion). I can go back and refer to an answer later. You can't do that with a phone conversation either.
All in all, my work would be much more difficult without IM.
-516
From the "What Is AimFight?" section:
What can fighting really prove? Using a complicated algorithm, AIM® Fight crawls through the depths of the Internet to answer the all-important question that plagues us all blah blah
Yee-ikes, traversing a tree is wicked hard. I'm glad I never had to learn to do anything like that in...oh, say..Comp Sci 1.
--- What
Yeah you're a little out of touch. I'm a senior in college and everyone I know uses AIM, and has since freshman year. This includes both nerds and 'popular' people.
In fact the 'popular' people generally have way more contacts and seem to get im'd nonstop all day.
What if I don't want my 'popularity' published?
You can also use your icq# to get a popularity rating based on that.
Shadus
It's not your fault it's ugly that's just the effect Perl has on anything. ;-)
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." - Alan Perlis