Ok i know i’ve blogged this before. It was sometime in December 06, and it was on my old blog. About situations where you meet two people who know each other, and you don’t nkow how they know each other. And then it’s the time for long explanations and all that.
The same happens online also. People you least expected to know each other will be friends on facebook, and you’ll need to know how they know each other. I wonder if an app can be built on this idea. And this is al that is there in my head right now.
Something like you can pick 2 people in your friends list and ask them how they know each other. There will be a page for every such pair of people, and this page will be visible to all those who are common friends of both. The page will be initialy populated with the answer to the question that facebook asks you when someone friends you – “how do you know XXXX”. and you give an answer such as “I went to kindergarten with her”. this will form the basis of that page, and people can grow that page by asking questions and putting answers (say let’s restrict size of each message to 140 characters, to preent people from boring us)
Actually we can have a hypergraph here – a “how do you guys know each other” need not be addressed to just two people. It could be addressed to more people, provided they form a clique (for the uninitiated, a clique is a set of people where everyone knows everyone else). and there can be a page for these. and then you can have cliques being subcliques of supercliques, and all that.
will be max fun, i think. and can b e supported by advertising. let me know if any of you want to develop this (i’m too lazy, of course). I give you full permissions, as long as you credit the idea to my name. you can keep the money.
Hari the kid is the person you should be looking for. He creates ideas for facebook apps every other day, but they never get past being “ideas”.
The groups system on orkut is a way of displaying ‘cliques’. Pretty much everybody is a member of school/college/PG/co groups….a glance is sufficient usually to figure out how someone came to know someone else
As for the Facebook app, what is the incentive for a person to add it and list down the reasons for 100+ friends? Doubt if junta have the enthu to do it
It exists already – not as an application – but when you add someone as a friend, there’s a bunch of options to answer how you know that person. And if you check one of them (one of them is ‘random’ and has space to explain how), then your friends can see it when they check your friend lists.