I’ve been giving some thought to use cases for social-networking software. Friendster really is the most useless functionality-wise if you’re looking for people you [used to] know irl, but well, even the best (tribe.net right now, I think) are still limited.

Part of the problem is that these services are designed for ‘meeting new people.’ That’s fine and all, but I suspect that for a lot of users, the keeping track of people you know part of is a lot of the draw as well; most of these applications fail miserably at that task.

• searches – should return all the personal information that a person wants to allow the public to see on searches (ie, there are a lot of John Doe’s; the Doe’s should be able decide if they want to be found or not, but if they want to be you should be able to try to narrow down to the one you want to find by more than a 10px thumbnail)
• privacy control – related to the above, there needs to be a way not only to specify your searchability on the network, but also of controlling relationship/info propagation
• groups – basically the ‘tribes’ idea, however, there needs to be a better way of filtering/organizing/subsetting these things
• creating agents to regularly monitor based on criteria (ie, keeping a lookout for high school buddies)
• notes – personal tagging/organization of friend’s profiles

Note, that the current centralized client/server model wouldn’t necessarily be the ideal infrastructure for this kind of application. (yeah, I still need to think of a project codename)

Oh yeah, since Andy was givin’ me crap about it, I threw a simple rss feed up. Full feed functionality coming eventually (after the rest of the blog stuff slowly goes up).

Teens Now Spend More Time Online Than Watching TV – aww yeah.

So, was down in SD for SIGGRAPH today. Spent almost more time driving than at the conference, but well, it was worthwhile. Can’t wait for it to get back to LA. Much less travel-time that way.

I Heart New York X Icons for OS X and XP. Also, a Creating Aqua Images in Adobe Photoshop tutorial

UCBerkeleyNews: Researchers help define what makes a political conservative:

Four
researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about
the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political
conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for
inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to
political conservatism include:

• Fear and aggression
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Need for cognitive closure
• Terror management

Tim Bray on the future of browsing.

In case this comes in handy for anyone: touchoff is a little perlscript I hacked together last night b/c I couldn’t find anything that would already allow time offseting by default. Perl has sort of lackluster date-handling functions for doing offsets by default (say, compared to PHP); Dave Rolsky has been working on DateTime modules, but honestly, that would’ve been overkill for this thing.

Usage: touchoff +/-TIME FILE...
Change the modification times of each FILE by the specified offset.
  +/-TIME    TIME is a decimal number appended by: d, h, m, or s
             for respective units.  Defaults to hours.

todo: try a python version; also, just for fun, a php version

Tonight’s goal: get calorie counter back up and running.

• USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 15 downloadable from the Nutrient Data Library site.

The ASCII is sorta a pita to parse; I wasn’t really up for manually recreating the data model. The easiest way to load the data ended up being using the sample Access DB, running exportSQL on it, and then dumpinging it into mysql from there. Worked w/o any complications (just be sure to reference the DAO libs first when calling the exportSQL module).

Ahh, seeing this Burning Man 2003 Travelocity package hoax reminds me of something Bruce Sterling said in an old /. interview