Invite helper tool
There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem with getting social networks rolling, because a social network is most interesting when there are other people to interact with, but there won't be other people to interact with unless some people are already there. To this end, I want to develop an invite group tool that will, given the number of invites you currently have available, your current friends interested in Dreamwidth, and your current friends on Dreamwidth, will try to figure out who it would be best to invite--who would be the most likely to have people to read on Dreamwidth? If you have a group of invites, which group of people on your friendslist are most connected to each other?
Implementation
- Ability to log in through OpenID with LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, InsaneJournal, etc
- Ability to attach different LiveJournal and Dreamwidth IDs to one user
- Lets you mark yourself for each LJ account as interested or not interested in Dreamwidth. Lets you attach DW accounts to an LJ account.
- Downloads the friend lists for all linked accounts
- If any of your LJ friends have logged on to the system and indicate they are interested, highlight them. They're invite material! If any of your LJ friends have linked to a DW account, lets you know where their account is, with highlighting if you haven't already friended them on DW.
- Could implement email notifications to let you know when a friend of yours is requesting a DW invite.
- Should let you "ignore" people, that is, have them not included in your list of considerations.
- Should let you add people not on your friends list.
If enough people start using the system, implement something where:
- You can enter a number of invites, and from the number of friends you have who want to join Dreamwidth, figure out which sets of users to invite, judging from who would have the most to read on Dreamwidth based on which of their friends have already moved and which people you intend to invite.
- Use XML-RPC to get someone's friends groups, so they can filter by that.
- Add a slapdash API to Dreamwidth that will go and fetch the invites and see who has used what and how many are still available.