Dopplr-tard: “Let’s get rid of mutual friends.”

Social Media Fanboy: “Like Twitter?”

Dopplr-tard: “Twitter is so hot right now.”

Social Media Fanboy: “But my location should be private unless I share it with someone else!”

Dopplr-tard: “Well, how about the opposite? I choose to share trips with you! Then you can see anything I send you and we don’t need to be mutual friends.”

Social Media Fanboy: “Brilliant! But what if I don’t want to see someone’s trips?”

Dopplr-tard: “Then you can just ‘mute’ them.”

ON A ONE-BY-ONE BASIS.

Useless and a complete waste of any Cute Girl’s time. I’d quit the service except that their Facebook app is pretty and I have some major carbon guilt.

Update: Matt, I like Dopplr and you can do so much better than this. Please bring back mutual friends and friend requests.

I’m fine with allowing people and bots to search by email if the email is “public” in the user’s Pownce privacy settings. The problem is that by default your email is “friends-only” and very few people change it to “public”.

To me there’s also a difference between allowing another Pownce user to search for you by email address and allowing a bot to search by email address. Specifically, Google’s social graph API plans search other social sites by email address to find your other accounts. This would be very helpful in helping you create profiles and find friends faster, but also could give Google a more of your personal data.

I suppose search engines could also do this by full name or username, but an email address is considered a unique identifier and lots of sites have you validate your email address after registering (though Pownce doesn’t).

Flickr and Twitter allow searching by email address and Facebook actively tries to prevent it. What should Pownce do? Is Pownce obliged to try to protect user data that is flagged as private or friends-only? Does searching by personal data differ from displaying personal data? Comment below or on Pownce - I’ll let you decide.

For contact lists, there are 3 ways: via XFN on your friends page (http://pownce.com/leahculver/friends/), via the API (http://api.pownce.com/users/leahculver/friends.xml), and now via a FOAF file (http://pownce.com/leahculver/foaf/).

When Brad asked to have Pownce support FOAF in particular and I did a lot of searching on the internet for super simple RDF FOAF generators.

Turns out the internet is full of parsers and rather devoid of generators. Ponder that for a second.

Anyways, rdflib does a great job of both but it was tough for me to find any examples of FOAF serialization (besides the image on the front page). Whenever I think it’s difficult to find something by a quick internet search I feel like I should post something about it.

So here’s my FOAF generator: foafutil.py

Note that the user parameter is a Django User model with a custom UserProfile. You can probably easily swap that out with whatever class you’re using to represent users. You could also add more fields since this is a pretty bare-bones example.

I’m off to Social Graph Foo Camp this weekend and since it’s the first Foo Camp I’ve ever been invited to, I’m feeling quite excited about it. Free the social graph!?

Update - Per Tom Morris‘ suggestion, I’ve updated the rdfs:seeAlso links to URIRefs.

Oh yeah, if anyone from Facebook is reading this, please don’t ban my account. I’m trying to obey the very lengthy TOS.

Anyways, remember how a few months ago Pownce added the ability to link to other social networks from your profile? It looks something like this:

I called it “profile bling”, mostly because that was all it was good for. It looks cute and helps your friends know what other online networks you’re active on.

WELL.

With the Friend Importer feature, the *bling* is actually helpful in matching your friends on other social networks to potential friends on Pownce.

It’s nothing fancy; the process is something like:

• ping the Facebook/Digg/Flickr/Twitter API for the user’s friend list
• match results to Pownce users based on username, full name, email, and/or *bling*
• return potential Pownce friend and let the user decide who to add as a friend

I’d like to say that I had secret plans all along to use that *bling*. Actually, I kind of hoped someone else would use the *bling* for their secret plans… I’m looking at you, DataPortability.org.

I finally revamped my string generating utility when I wanted to generate a human-readable string. I’d like each Pownce user to have a “syndication key” for several potential new features including custom feeds (non-public), upcoming event feeds, and email posting. It’s helpful to have a readable key for email posting since nobody wants to remember something like “cp59p18sv3wwi4z0″. Blech. That’s just fine for API keys though.

Flickr does a nice readable key with actual short words (5-6 characters) for their email posting. I didn’t really want to use a dictionary of available words and thought that the form used in this example was probably good enough. It generates something like “fof91yoj”.

So here’s the final result.

The only thing you’ll need to change is where you’re getting the lists, BANNED_WORDS and BANNED_PHRASES. Pownce is becoming a total rat’s nest and I’m too lazy to mess with these for the example.

Is there a library (Python or Django) to do this already? I didn’t search too hard because I really wanted to an excuse to write code that uses lambda.

Another shout-out to MediaTemple, my new blog host. They seem to be doing some cool stuff with Django, so if you’re thinking of starting a hosted Django project, I’d check out their Django GridContainer.

OMG! I have sub-links in Google search results! At least until the next Google dance…

Considering I rarely write in my blog, I’m quite thrilled about this.

I’d like to be easygoing.

The past year has been a little rough on me - starting a business, helping build an online community on Pownce, having my heart broken, living thousands of miles from my family, and being scrutinized on the internet. For much of the past year I’ve been tense, moody, restless and a much too serious person.

Well, life is tough.

My life is no rougher than anyone else’s and I’d like to get back to being the bubbly, fun person that I think I once was. I’d like to stop worrying what people are saying and start saying all the nice things I think about others. I’d like to be supportive. I’d like to flirt in my comments I’d like to recognize all the people I admire and support their projects. I’d like to be a positive person. I’d like to get back to finding new music and going out with friends. I’d like to let go.

I hope this one goes as well as last year’s.

So here are the 5 hottest hacker chicks in the movies…

5. Maggie Madsen - Transformers (2007)

Famous Quote - “You need to move past Fourier transforms and start thinking quantum mechanics.”

4. Natalya Simonova - GoldenEye (1995)

Famous Quote - “Do you destroy every vehicle you get into?”

3. Angela Bennett - The Net (1995)

Famous Quote - “Where can I hook up my modem?”

2. Trinity - Matrix (1999)

Famous Quote - “A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something. ”

1. Kate Libby aka Acid Burn - Hackers (1995)

Famous Quote - “I hope you don’t f**k like you type.”

I’ve been very impressed with the progress on the Django trunk and am looking forward to the next stable release. If you’re thinking of starting a web project, I would recommend trying Django based on the awesome community.

View the slides here.