I have a couple questions about friends. OSM friends, that is. It seems a pretty hollow concept to me so I'd like to start a discussion on how to make it more meaningful. You can make friends on the website by adding someone as a friend. But how and where are those relations leveraged and exposed?
I know: * You can see who is your friend on your user page * There seem to be (undocumented) make_friend and remove_friend API calls[1] * The section about friends on the wiki says it doesn't do much[2]. I would like to know: * Whether the friendee is notified about being friended by another user. * Whether your / any user's friend info is exposed through the API. * Whether there are any benefits to adding someone as a friend - other than being able to see their home location if set. * How many friend relations the database currently contains. And most importantly: * How could the OSM friend concept be made more meaningful? Some ideas: * Integrate with other social networks (find OSM friends through Twitter / Facebook / ...) * Being able to group-send messages to your friends. * Having friend groups I realize that these are some pretty big ideas and with my own limited Rails skills I will probably not be able to make a significant dent in implementing any of them. But before we get to that stage, let's have a discussion about this topic. What are your ideas about OSM friends? Martijn [1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6/Command_Overview [2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Web_front_end#Friends -- martijn van exel geospatial omnivore 1109 1st ave #2 salt lake city, ut 84103 801-550-5815 http://oegeo.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
