dw_biz | Finding people you know on DW

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feature design

Finding people you know on DW

I've been pondering this question for a bit (foregrounded in my mind again by the latest wave of newly-minted dwenizens brought to us by LJ's unavailability this week and as a reaction to the real-names fiasco of Google+) and, failing to come up with any real answers -- or rather, coming up with too many conflicting answers, and none of them good ones -- I realized that the best thing to do would be to take it to you all, lay out my reasoning, and see what kind of solutions we can come up with when we all brainstorm together. :)

The task: Make it easy for people to find their existing friends on Dreamwidth, either while they're registering or after they've signed up.

The problem: Preventing new-user-dropoff (someone who registers an account, pokes around a bit, and then never returns to your site) is a function of a lot of different factors, but one of the biggest ones, with a social networking site, is: are the people I care about already using this service, and if so, can I find them? If people don't find the group of people they care about using the service already, they're more likely to wander off and never come back.

Services try to deal with this in a lot of different ways. The most common is an "address book reading" function: the site asks for access to your email address book, searches its database, and coughs up a list of people with those email addresses using the site. If it's done well, this can be helpful. If it's done badly, it's a privacy disaster. It also requires you to provide the site with access to your email account, and in most cases, requires you to be using a) a web-based email provider b) that they have programmed into the system (so, pretty much Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail).

Other methods are things like a "you may know" service -- like how Twitter suggests "similar users" (based, I believe, mostly on who follows whom), and Dreamwidth's popular subscriptions page (a paid feature on DW, since it's resource-intensive to calculate). That kind of thing is good at identifying people who are in your extended network (friends of friends) once you have a few people in your circle, but they don't help to prime the pump: if you don't subscribe to anybody up front, those tools don't return results.

There are other technical solutions that people have thought up over time; things like various data files and formats you can import into a new service and have it scan for people who match (much like the email address book, only slightly less privacy-invading). Problems with those include user education, the fact those standards aren't well-known and well-applied, the fact there are tons of competing standards ...

So everybody, everybody keeps coming back to the "share your email address book, scan the users database for accounts that match those email addresses, return the results". And I can find solutions to most of the massively problematic portions of that concept, and things that could make the function more useful and flexible:

* Problem: what if I don't want anyone who has my email address to be able to find me? Solution: Allow DW users to choose whether or not they can be "email matched" -- if they say "no, people shouldn't be able to find me", then we respect that. (And release the feature pegged initially to the privacy settings that users have put on their email address: if you don't display the email address on your profile, you don't get the email search turned on, which essentially only automates the existing 'search by email' function that's in the site-wide search bar.)

* Problem: what if one of my friends is using a different email address on DW than I have for them? Solution: Allow DW users to add "other email addresses I should be searchable by" to their accounts, so I could (for instance) confirm that I own the email [email protected] (which is the email address I was using for a really long time) in addition to [email protected] (which is the email address I use with the site now). The other confirmed email addresses wouldn't display on the site, but it'd let people search and find you by. (You'd still run into the problem of people having outdated email addresses that you couldn't confirm anymore -- there are still people who know me by email addresses I haven't used in over a decade, I'm sure -- but we wouldn't want to allow people to use any arbitrary email address, lest I say that I'm [email protected] and hilarity ensues.)

* Problem: what if my address book is full of people I sent email to once and don't want to ever talk to again, or companies with whom I interacted but don't want to be social with (true, and amusing, story: [email protected] gets invited to new social networks all the freaking time), or (for instance) family members such as Aunt Margaret who would keel over and need smelling salts if she found out that I write porn about TV characters in my spare time? Solution: don't automatically add the people you find from an address book crawl, but instead just give people a list of the accounts returned by the address crawl, and let them choose whether or not to either a) add the person to their circle directly or b) send out an email saying "Hey, I'm on Dreamwidth now!" and let them choose whether or not to begin a relationship.

There are other problems I can think of, but those are the ones that immediately come to mind as the biggest concerns, and all of them are workable-around. You can also take the same idea behind "address book crawl" and extend it to other services: do things like letting people add/verify their Twitter account, for instance, and match it against other added/verified Twitter accounts, or add/verify their LJ account and match that, or really any other social network that has any form of automated function for returning "list the people I have relationships with". (And, of course, there's the method of building "places I have lived/worked/gone to school" fields into the profile or the site directory, so you can search for people who graduated school with you, or people who worked at $formerjob from 2002-2005, or people who lived in downtown Baltimore from 1997-2002, etc. But that requires a bunch of overhead in validating and sanitizing input, so you don't get eight thousand variations in spelling, which is what made the LJ schools directory so incredibly human-intensive and part of why we discontinued it on DW.)

I'm sure there are other possible awesome ideas that I'm just not thinking of, though, and I'm also sure there are other problems with the "mine your list of connections on other sites and match against the DW userbase" idea that I'm just not thinking of off the top of my head. So, I figured I'd throw it out to y'all at large, seeing as how you are a) extremely intelligent people b) who want to see DW succeed c) and are used to carefully thinking through an idea and evaluating it on privacy, security, and usability grounds.

So, the questions I have for y'all:

* What other ways can you think of to help a new user find their existing friends who have accounts on DW easily, quickly, and with minimal hassle?

* How can we best balance your privacy with your desire to find people you know?

* How can we help preserve the right not to be found by people you don't want to find you?

* What else am I forgetting to think of?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

I'd love to have an easy solution to find my LJ friends here, with a click.

No, I don't have anything helpful to say, I just wanted to say this would be neat :)

If one could sign in with OpenID to verify control of remote account, and then choose to save this publicly, access-locked, privately, or not at all, and then fetch one's publicly available FOAF (friends data) file from LJ, and then go through that and see:

a) if anyone listed in that file has a publicly verified DW account, list them and their relationship to you on LJ.
b) if anyone listed in that file has indicated that they'd like to show their account to verified LJ-friends, list them as well.
c) also un-authenticated people, with their relationship & the fact that they have listed but not verified, let you make up your own mind
d) ask "Would you like to send your DW username to users on your LiveJournal friends list who have DW accounts and who have enabled notifications for this?" and if there is anyone who has privately verified and has that notification turned on, send a message containing the LJ username and the DW username.

Allow access/subscribe by tickybox to the users listed from A, B, and C
Have a page where one can return at any time and see any & all listed / authenticated (and public or permission-granted) users from one's LJ FOAF who may have shown up in the interim. Refresh as it is accessed.

Please, anyone and everyone, come pick holes in this!

Edited 2011-08-08 03:24 (UTC)

Question: is there a way to do it without address-book crawl? E.g. a field where you could input a list of e-mail addresses you want to search for?

More cumbersome, but wouldn't produce the instinctive AAAAAAH MY E-MAIL PASSWORD WHY ARE YOU ASKING FOR THAT skincrawl.

And it would also mean it would work for people who aren't using Gmail/Yahoo Mail/Hotmail (or who are using another e-mail program as well as a web-based one).

I'd prefer that list, too, as it has fewer privacy issues and also easily weeds out the One Time Ebay Transaction and Job Contact That Went Nowhere or Beta Response That Went Awry addresses. ;-)

It is just my opinion, and no one has to pay any attention at all, and I'm also a privacy freak, but I'd say everything's fine now as it is. We'll find each other by posting our dw acc link/name given f-locked in other places (ij/lj/jf etc.), by email, by msgs etc.

It would be nice to have the ability to say, "I have the X,Y, Z identities, please make them searchable".

Especially if one could use OpenID or similar to log in and verify when available, and then list something like "confirmed [datestamp]" where others could see it, for increased trust. Of course one can always say "I am ____" and others can take it with the appropriate grain of salt, but when it's technologically possible to confirm this, it might help strengthen things.

goldkin just posted something interesting about why he prefers Facebook and Twitter to Dreamwidth: http://goldkin.dreamwidth.org/18380.html

One of the big benefits, for him, was transience, but another was because "users and content are much more ... findable", and "posting- and follow impedance [are] very low."

I think something to help people find content, or types of users as opposed to specific users, might be very useful for Dreamwidth.

A directory for the network, to help with the people-you-already-might-know.

This would list the users who could be found on the network page (or would be found there, if they'd updated). It could be sorted in alphabetical order or maybe also by last update time (given the 5 minutes of grace time for oopsies), with the default icons of the people listed there, paginated, and showing the users (and also communities and feeds) through which you are connected. There would be basic stats from the profile like date of last entry, maybe number of journal entries and journal age.

It could also be available for free users who do not have the network page, but to save it would not include the icons.

I wonder if any of the engineering that went into the AO3's Wrangulator could be made to work for interests.

Apologies, I should probably re-read this, twice, before posting, and certainly edit out the first four paragraphs which is my brain warming up to half speed. But I had thoughts in my head, and if I don't share them, I shall regret it, and there's at least half a good idea in there. Somewhere. It should be noted that I am writing from a position of almost total ignorance on anything remotely related to the word 'social', so while it may sound good in my head, it may not actually be sound. Hopefully somebody might find it an interesting alternative perspective.

And this is why things tend to be an internal monologue, rather than an external monologue. (Which isn't to say they aren't open to dialogue, it just starts with me)

Reading, and re-reading this Dreamwidth business post which is basically talking about social networking. And improving or easing the networking side of the Dreamwidth social community.

The comments kind of devolved into two themes. The first, staying on topic, was how do I find my existing social network on Dreamwidth. The second deviated into a more general discussion of how else social networking might be improved on Dreamwidth and opportunities for finding like minded people.

There's a lot of scope for discussion on that second aspect, but it is and needs to be a separate topic, and a whole other job of work, because it has a different emphasis. Things like the Network tool - I found that now that I'm Premium, it's neat, but....I'd really love to see a variant as suggested working more like the interests tool, which speaking of, the ability for more complex interest searching would also be nifty (however, having written a very light 'complex predicate parser' I know there can be technical headaches if you get too....technical). It isn't something that I want to dwell on right now.

Mostly, I was interested in the question of how do I find my existing social network. Phrased like that, it shifts the emphasis away from the original question of 'existing friends', and makes it subtly different. But I have a reason for that.

There's a couple of good reasons why general Social Networks use address book beating to farm connections. The first is persistent identity, which is falacious as many people use separate / throw away e-mail addresses for registering in different areas. I often use a separate one for MMO gaming, for instance. However, e-mail addresses are still currently the one common currency between all social networks. Generally, when creating an identity on a new social network, the first thing you have to do is key in and validate an e-mail address. So your e-mail becomes your persistent identity over and above your name (subjective and non-unique) and tends to be the only alternative identity that many social networks have for you, so being the only data point they can link.

The second reason is the assumption that your e-mail address is your social network. Which again, is false. In my case, it's blatantly false, but even for average people, I'm inclined to suppose that it's not completely true. Yes, it's true that your e-mail address book will contain a lot of people that you do talk to, and e-mail regularly. But particularly with, cough, certain sites, your e-mail address book will also fill up with contacts that are not a part of your social network. Googlemail still keeps trying to convince me to cc my landlady every time I e-mail my wife, because of three e-mails sent to my landlady that got cc'd the other way.

So, taking a step back from the e-mail solution, because the problems it offers are solvable. There are ways to make it less intrusive (it's a back end tool, part of account maintenance, call it a social mapping tool if you like, it's NOT something that should be tied to account creation in any way, and the system should NEVER ask me, it should let me find it, easily and discretely). It's trickier to handle the log in requirements, but once a list of e-mail addresses is available, that can then be processed securely and sensitively. But essentially, we're using e-mail addresses to get a list of names.

Any list of names is subject to additional concerns, but the biggest issue with an e-mail address book is that that should be a private list. Whereas many if not most social networks make their living out of having public lists of connections. After all, that's kind of what a social network is, a list of your friends, and their friends, and their distant acquaintances and second cousins.

So why not tackle the problem directly? Why not go to the social networks, and pull the networks from them? Because that was the original question as I posed it.

There's two requirements on this, both tricky. I'm not going to go too far into technical implementation, partly because I don't know enough about anything to know what's readily practical and what isn't. But also because I don't want to constrain myself. At this point in time, I don't need to be constrained by reality, I just want to get a sense of how things maybe 'should' be. Once we know how they should be, we can see if there is any path from where we are to where we want to be, and how many bridges we'll have to build to get there.

How do I make myself more [or less] findable on Dreamwidth?

The first requirement is self-identification. Okay, so... For this to work, the first thing is that it's inherently an opt in thing. We're thinking in Dreamwidth centric terms, but again, that's where we are, the scope for other networks to integrate similar technology is what's called madness, or evolution, or the Internet. And at the moment, we're only dealing with single point to point concepts.

Dreamwidth has already inherited and expanded upon the ability to provide a list of, basically IMs. So as part of your user information, you can key in a limited number of IM identifiers so that your friends or otherwise can speak to you through these messaging networks.

I really liked the suggestion that this should be expanded, or a new category added, so that as well as IM based networks, you could also add social networks. So you could add, on Dreamwidth, that you are at such and such an address on LiveJournal, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Tumblr (what is that?), and so on. It would be nice to, on Dreamwidth, be able to say that I can also be found here, here and here.

This cross-site promotion is then your search hook, this is your list of identity correlations, which means that it's purely opt in. If a user doesn't say 'I'm here on Facebook', then you're not going to find them, which is an additional layer of privacy, because hey, I don't necessarily want my Dreamwidth account associated with my Facebook account, but I'm happy to have it associated with my old LiveJournal account. It requires users to be on board with the idea, and to be willing to link up their social networks, but that's their prerogative.

This first requirement actually gives you a solid baseline for a solution in its own right, though there's more to be done. Currently, I believe that the IMs list is in an all or nothing category on your user information. Which is to say that you can allow people to see all or none of your IMs.

Ideally, to satisfy the needs of privacy, it should be possible to set, against each IM / SN, two independent flags. The first would be the security level at which people can see this identity, which should be the same security levels as for entries including filters / groups. The second flag is whether this IM / SN can be searched on using the site tools. There should probably also be user default settings that any new additions get added to.

(I'm aware that this is a general maintenance overhead. Keeping pace with IMs has probably been bad enough, but having to add in each new social network that crops up is probably on another sphere entirely, and would have to be factored into long term thinking)

So we have a list of identities now, and we can make the necessary improvements to the inline search in the header and in the directory, to allow us to search an identity across any or a specific social network. This means we have almost satisfied requirement one, self-identification and the ability to search for an individual on Dreamwidth. To manage it, we just need users to choose which social networks they want to be identifiable by on Dreamwidth.

But we haven't gone quite far enough yet, and this is where the fun begins. LiveJournal and Dreamwidth have inherently chosen to trust IM identities. Partly, this is because they don't have a lot of choice, but primarily, this is because the emphasis is different, very different.

With IMs, what everybody implicitly understands the user information as saying is 'you can also find me here, at this address'. If you want to talk to me, here I am. It wasn't originally intended, I'm sure, as a facilitator for 'You know me as this person elsewhere, so here's how you can find me on Dreamwidth'.

We're leading into validation of identities. And this is where we have a problem, because there's no standards, and no consistency. Technically, it's likely that every new social network that gets added to the Dreamwidth list will need a new protocol to be figured out and established for validating.

And validation is critical. If I lay claim to be ICQ UIN 300, people will laugh at me. But also, because of the emphasis noted above, it's more likely that people will be starting from my Dreamwidth account, knowing me, and then looking me up on ICQ, hopefully by invitation. So if my ICQ number is wrong, they're going to poke me.

When you reverse the scenario, and someone who regularly talks to the real ICQ UIN 300 tries to find them on Dreamwidth, we have a problem of impersonation, and all that follows. So out going traffic, unvalidated claims are fine, and we can have a nice system that allows for display of 'I claim to also be voldsom on LiveJournal, and you can find me there'. That works, but we need to warn users clearly, that if they are searching on Dreamwidth for voldsom on LiveJournal, that this person may not be who they say they are.

It doesn't take much cross checking, particularly if you know me, to be sure that for once, I am the same person in two different places, but this is a risk that you want to take away from the user if at all possible.

So, validation. A mechanism for proving that you do own a particular identity on a particular social network. I'm going to assume that the base mechanism for validation is simple, and works in exactly the same way as validating an e-mail address. My simplistic assumption is that you generate a token, and a url, and by getting the validating user to visit that url, you have a confirmation. Simple, yes.

How do you get the url to the user safely and securely? Simplistically put, you probably can't, but I don't like that answer. The alternative answer becomes even more complex. For LiveJournal and its siblings, you have a degree of flexibility with OpenId, though I'm not sure how much. Facebook I'm certain that you could do something because I did in times past cross correlate my Facebook account to my World of Warcraft account, so if they can do it... Twitter and others I've never used in anger. Or even in happiness.

This is where reality rears its ugly head. In practical terms, this probably requires a degree of cross party development, and standards. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that we'd need a different validation method for LiveJournal than for Facebook, and so on. To a degree, that's okay. To a degree, we can start a first phase without validation, though it feels incredibly unwise and brings into stark relief the question of how we manage an unvalidated claim when a conflicting validated claim exists. (Yeah, owie) But it's probably a deal breaker.

Which brings us back to e-mail, because e-mail is standardised, and all these disparate social networks are not. The only thing that all these social networks have in common is that with the possible exception of Facebook [/snark] they want to prevent third parties from hooking in through automated systems and contacting their users directly. Which is exactly what validation is. At its simplest level, as Dreamwidth, I want to connect to the social network and leave a private message for the identity that you have claimed as yours, which contains the URL for you to validate against. Because that'll happen. Because I'd actually even want to let that happen. Because any doorway left open for that to happen gets ruthlessly exploited before somebody has even hypothesized it.

Validation is hard, but smarter people than me might be able to say 'actually, you can...', and everybody knows that trailing ellipsis make the world a better place. What I also don't know is whether validation is a deal breaker here. I think that it probably is. I think that even if we can tell the user clearly that this is an unsubstantiated claim on a particular social network, that's not enough. It's good enough for the user to be able to say 'look, I'm here on this other social network', because side bar links are good for that anyway. It's possibly good enough for individual searches through the search tools, because those are divorced from circle maintenance anyway. I don't think it's good enough for a tool that's designed to connect social networks.

Two final notes. Firstly, the development of additional 'identifiers' should also include e-mail addresses, and probably wants to be normalised out. This might tie in to the question floating elsewhere of alternate accounts on Dreamwidth itself, but it's entirely possible that you might want to link your Dreamwidth account to two or three LiveJournal accounts, and be searchable by all of those identities. (It becomes implicit that Dreamwidth itself should be in our list of social networks)

Secondly, I really liked the style annotation that this should be made available as a style component in the same way as linked lists, so that you can make it available for browsers on your journal without them necessarily having to visit your profile page.

Actually, you can ... ;)

(There are a few existing protocols for validation of identity across platforms. The problem is that there are multiple standards, and not all of them do (what we think is) the RIght Thing, and some of them are a pain to implement ... but there are protocols already. I'd say about half the sites out there support them.)

Yay. :)

(I have yet to figure out if too many protocols is worse than none.)

How can I find the people that I know on Dreamwidth?

So, now we have a wonderful social community where everybody who wants to be found has identified the alternative social networks that they want to be associated with. With this, we have a much greater scope for doing individual searches.

The next bit, surely, must be gravy. To a degree, it is. We have, slowly and painstakingly, built up a system through our users where we're back to square one, but ahead of the other social networks. Because we now have a comprehensive list of alternative identities for our users. This means that the massive step back of not using e-mail is actually practical.

We can adapt our e-mail technology to be any list of names for any listed service.

All of the other provisos probably go unspoken, they're covered in the original design and problem solving, and in the comments, but I'll probably iterate on a few of them. The basic process flow is as follows. As a user, we go to the Dreamwidth social mapping page, and we enter the social network we want to find our circle on, and our name on that social network.

Here's the first critical question, should we be challenging or validating anything at that point, based on all of the provisos above. At its simplest, should this actually be a list of validated social networks already validated against this account.

Because suddenly, the skeevy notion of having to key in an e-mail address and password becomes incredibly important. Because now it's acting as the protective layer that it's supposed to be. The intention for the service is that I am going to another social network, and mapping my social network there to my social network on Dreamwidth. But what is to prevent somebody else from entering my name on that other social network, and using it to stalk all of my connections here.

Inherently, because friends lists are/can be mostly public on Dreamwidth, this can happen anyway. However, there's a massively different emphasis between doing it internally to a single site, and doing it across sites. I want to be able to connect to my circle on another social network and find them on Dreamwidth, but I'm not convinced that I want somebody else to be able to do the same thing just as easily. I'm equally not convinced that just because the existing design structure allows it internally justifies allowing it externally. This might be one of those areas where I'm average, and what feels wrong to me will feel wrong across the board, which means validation.

Once we're happy, we reach my core critical assumption, and please, nobody tell me how wrong I am.

My key assumption is that once we've generated the internal data through our users to do the mapping, it's actually an easy process to go to a third party site and get their friends list in an exportable format. This is based on the blind mis-assumption that social networks are inherently open, based on my incredibly minimal experience with a very small number of actual social networks and almost zero social skills.

I don't know what the key social networks are, here, that would need to be covered for the project to be considered a success. I'm guessing that LiveJournal would be one of the core ones, and I have enough peripheral knowledge to know that it's possible there. I tend to assume Facebook, and Twitter probably, and inevitably Google+. I don't know, and I haven't looked to see, how from a logged out perspective one might correlate connections, if one even can.

There's the additional aspect here of local security. I'd have to check, but I'm sure you can hide at least some of this information. So if you wanted to do this process, you'd have to access your LJ account, and make the data available for the small window of running the process, before making it unavailable again. Frankly, though, I see that being far less of a problem...so long as the error handling is accomodating.

Which brings us full circle. From our starting point on Dreamwidth, we have accessed another system, and attained a list of interesting names. With those interesting names, we can now back search to find out if those names exist associated with a Dreamwidth journal id. And this social network list is likely to be far more targetted than a list of e-mail addresses, so we benefit from hopefully a far higher hit rate.

Once you have a list of names, you can generate a page, which... Will almost be two lists of names. I think two of my biggest bug bears with any system like this had already been nailed down completely. First off, it's incredibly ill mannered and loutish to include a request system like this as part of account creation. It's not something that a site should ever ask you to do, but it's a nice option that you might want to take up. Also, and equally, it should be a repeatable option, since networks shift and change. The second bug bear is that it absolutely, categorically, cannot be automated, no way no how.

Useability almost takes second place to control here, in my head, with the fact that you don't want to automate or appear to automate any part of the process. So if we're talking ticky boxes of addiness, allowing you the scope to add multiple users, I would personally cringe at the existence of a global ticky box, so that users can just spam all. I would want to encourage them, gently, to tick each and every single box out of their three hundred friends, just to be sure that the onus is completely on them to sense check that list and preserve Aunt Murgatroyd's dignity by not going through the process of accidentally adding her, panicking and having to remove her.

If I were brutally honest, I would almost prefer not to have any facility to add multiple people at a time, but that's a personal preference. I also completely agree with the suggestion that at a journal level, you should be able to control how you are displayed in a social mapping search of this type. Though, I would question up front how said flag would interact with a normal search through the header bar (as in the current search by IM functionality).

This would break down into a slightly complicated display that parallels the list of four mentioned in the comments above...

Effectively you'd have a list of remote social network identities, and their connection to you on that social network as appropriate. Then, where the journal flag is set to searchable, you would have their Dreamwidth identity. You would also have a very clear and prominent indicator to show whether this is a validated connection between the Dreamwidth identity and the remote social network. It would also be a nicety to in some measure indicate your current connectivity on Dreamwidth as well, which might be as simple as not enabling / including the ticky box of addiness (technical term).

The slightly more UI complex bit is managing those people who either want to be notified on social map searches, or who outright do not want to be found (implying a three tier flag). Technically, it's simple. For security we cannot and should not differentiate between names on the remote social network that we can't find, names on the remote social network that we can find but that don't want to be searched for, and names on the remote social network that we can find and who want to be notified. All three of these potentials need to look the same, with a ticky box, so that you don't get any indicator of whether said person on the remote social network has a Dreamwidth account or not. Once we have a set of ticky boxes, and the user clicks the 'ask nicely' button, we notify the ones who care, and discard the other options, putting responsibility on the person being friended. The bit that I can't wrap my head around, which is inherently section d elsewhere, is how you explain this to the user concisely, clearly and unambiguously. There have to be ticky boxes because ~~ticky boxes are love~~ there may be people fall into the notify bracket that you don't actually want to add. But explaining 'these are the people who may or may not be on Dreamwidth who if they are have opted out of social mapping but may or may not accept a notification request from you, so if you tick the box we may or may not ask them nicely, and they may or may not get back to you' is slightly (okay massively) outside of my capabilities.

Thank you so much for taking the time to write all this out, by the way. It is a very useful perspective, and there's a lot of good thoughts in here. I'd love to see you doing more feature design and brainstorming stuff in the future; you have the ability to think through things logically! (Do you know about

dw_suggestions? It can always use someone to do deep analysis like this of tendentious or controversial suggestions!)

*smiles softly* My pleasure, and thank you. (I've already found my way to the suggestions community, yes. I think that if I allowed myself, I could spend way, way too much time there.)

*innocent look* I would never recommend that someone spend way too much time in suggestions. Not at all. Never.

I can see the potential for getting a good discussion started there and then realizing that it's two hours past bedtime...

(no subject)

voldsom - 2011-08-12 20:26 (UTC) - Expand

What about adding a field "other names" to the user profile?

For both email searches and a potential "other name" field search, I'd like to see an option to be contacted when someone finds you based on that field, so you can approve whether that person will be given your username. For example, let's say I've checked off a box titled "screen people who can find me via email address". A coworker puts in my email address (which is based upon my legal name). The coworker then sees one of two possibilities (the user can choose which): "one of your email contacts is on DW; we will contact hir with your DW username" or "your email contact XXX is not on DW." Then I get a message from DW saying "your email address was found by XXX" (where XXX would either be my coworkers DW username or my coworker's email address, as ze chooses in hir preferences) and there are appropriate links so you can add that person if you want, or never reveal your DW username if that's what you prefer.

Mm...seems like this is a good time/place to remind people about

followfriday/the Follow Friday meme.

Also, commenting helps. If you're browsing the Latest Page and you run across a 'hi world, I'm new here' post, it's pretty darn simple to comment with 'hi so-and-so, I'm here via the Latest Page/saw your post on the Latest Page, welcome to Dreamwidth, hope you find this is a good place for you.' Simple, short, takes two seconds...and it might just make someone's day. (Either that, or make them realize they'd prefer different privacy settings, in which case better sooner than later.)

What about an opt-in directory where you can put yourself into a list of users, and provide some identifying information to help people see that it's you? [i.e. - livejournal username, twitter username]

It would eliminate the invasive aspects of asking for access to contacts. Then people can just go looking for people they know if they want to, and people can decide if they want to be found as well.

I'm not sure how the functionality on something like this would work, but the idea popped up and we can never have too many of those!

As a newcomer, I come to thinking in the same way and what I've got so far:
1. Very simple code snippet which takes circle data from the other site (like this one - http://www.livejournal.com/misc/fdata.bml?user=romikchef ) and shows just usernames matched on the DW.
It will make some misses for sure but it can help, it's easy and there are no privacy issues at all.
It can use bound accounts usernames in case it differs from DW user name.

2. Split comments problem.
Not directly answers to the "find-a-friend" problem but rather "new-user-dropoff" one:
An issue that hinders complete settlement on DW is split comments problem. Some people may comment here and some there. It would be great if one can make comments updated in DW-based post.
I know that I can close commenting in lj-post, but such a solution lacks usability a lot.

3. Community import. Specific to lj, hardest to implement but of no less importance.
As far as I know, there are no way to import lj community. But it would be nice to have such a feature, because communities are things that keeps people with the old site.

For 2, if you're using the DW cross-poster, you can then re-run the importer, and it will recognise cross-posted entries and bring across comments from the LJ/IJ version.

For 3, it's on the roadmap and being worked on, just not here yet - it's a lot more complex than personal journal import.

I'm another person who uses a different email for every site I register on, so trying to find me by email wouldn't be very productive. I use Algeh on pretty much every site I use, though, so I assume people looking for me type that in as an early guess.

What I'd like, in addition to being about to list other sites and the usernames I have there in some searchable way, would be to list URLs that are mine generically, such as my main personal domain page now and the web page I kept my teen-angst-infested webjournal on in the late 90s. I don't know how many other people would care, but if such a search became available I'd plug all the URLs from old journals I've lost touch with over the last decade into such a search to try to find those people again.

Arbitrary URL claiming would also be a good way for people to link their DW accounts with their account from various message boards (by linking their profile URLs) without DW having to try to make a list of every website that has a message board. (I don't know how many places still have active message boards - I lurk on one or two. I know most of my original LJ friends list was generated by adding the other people from message boards I posted on at the time, but that was many years ago.)

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Finding people you know on DW

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cultural ways to increase site stickiness

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