New LUGRadio Episode
I should have reported earlier, but there’s a new episode of Jono Bacon and co.’s excellent Linux radio show, LUGRadio, out. It’s the Christmas special, and you can get it from the download page (use the torrent!).
The show features an interview with Justin Davies, in which he talks about social networks and buddyPing. This got me thinking about what I’d want from a social network. I’ve fiddled with a few social networks in the past but never really found any useful purpose. I don’t believe that the current generation of social networks integrate well enough with the ‘offline’ world, in particular their integration with mobile devices is pretty lame. Almost all mobile devices these days have a calendar function, and many support SyncML. One of the biggest problems with arranging social events is finding a mutually appropriate time for them to happen, so it makes sense to me to build a social network with a group calendaring system that can do this for you. Combining that with a photo upload service and multi-format messaging would be a real winner. Maybe it’s one for the project list next year.
James,
buddyPing will be adding a lot of this stuff into a mobile java client very soon. As I said on the interview, I am fully aware of the issues surrounding social networking sites not being good enough, and offlining some of this to a mobile device is a big part of buddyPing going forward.
You are more than welcome to join us in getting the best out of MoSoSo if you want.
Justin
Comment by Justin Davies — December 21, 2005 @ 7:06 pm
I hadn’t considered a Java client - I suppose Java support is pretty much a standard feature on most handsets these days. This could certainly be a big help, especially if you could access the location finding features from the Java client itself rather than querying the network from the server end, which costs money every time.
Comment by james — December 22, 2005 @ 11:52 am