This is one of my Projects, it’s called Aquaintances, and is an RSS reader.
Aquaintances 1 was a web based RSS reader that did very little other than download all my feeds and store them locally.
Aquaintances 2 was a desktop RSS reader that did likewise, which I gave up on because the embedded Mozilla GTK component sucked ass.
This is the idea for Aquaintances 3, which also links in to a large extent with the vague ideas for Walrus.
Walrus
I’m active on many different things, and some of them (Maybe most?) have some kind of API to tell me who I’ve listed as a “friend”/“contact” whatever (These, in Walrus/Aquaintances terminology, are Wires). Ideally, I’d link all these to one canonical user ID, probably over OpenID, to provide a meta-social network without having to have an account on Walrus. The difficulty is tying Aquarion@Flickr with Aquarion@Gmail with Jascain@CIT with Aquarion@last.fm with Aquarionical@Myspace, but that’s what the Walrus API will do.
Aquaintances Next
This is what I want Aquaintances to do:
Sort by local popularity
This is one of the things v2 was supposed to do, basically it asks your local network what’s cool. This involves how many people have a) seen, b) read, c) enjoyed/saved/shared the item. This may involve ranking, or just “This is cool”. Local network is defined by Walrus and - if this is a desktop client - Bonjour networking.
Sort by global popularity
Digg. Del.icio.us. Technoarti. Newsvine, google, slashdot. Have they seen this?
Recommend feeds
X people in your local group respect the wisdom of Y. Read them.
Recommend knots
X people in your local group also connect to Y. Do you know them?