Being CS

Dashboard and Orkut

I was reading through this entry on Edd Dumbill's blog, and had an idea for the use of the Graph button in Dashboard. Right now I feel that displaying the graph of clue's might be interesting to look at, but is not particularly useful to a user. Replacing this with a graph of the relationship of the displayed person to other people you know, using input from social networking tools like Orkut would open many new possibilities. This led me to some more fundamental ideas of how Dashboard, Social Networking, and plugins like Edd Dumbill's plugin are going to change our daily lives.
Program's like BlueFOAF will allow you to get information on people who you don't necessarily know, it would be interesting to use information from Orkut, to see if a person is a friend of a friend of yours. It could also be used for pointing out people with similar interests to you.

This is what Social Networking is really meant to do, and is a large part of what we are trying to do with ISIS and the concepts of familiar strangers. Places like universities, schools, and conferences are the best place to test such technologies, and it would be amazing if we could do a test run of a program like that some time this year. Now we only need Orkut to loosen up its restrictions on running bots or other kinds of programs through it. On the other hand, there are enough people on the ISIS team that know Orkut personally to get this to work.