LJ has added easy downloading of FOAF data (the data is cached, so it shouldn't be too big a load on LJ's servers if people start using it heavily, I gather). More information is available in the
ljfoaf community.

I made passing reference in an earlier post to the idea of using decaying influence in a social network -- i.e., that the further someone is from me in my social network, the less influence they have on what I see. In eurekster, for example, single-hop friends would have far more effect on moving a possible link up in my search results than four-hop "friends". As I think about it, there's a more general question here: within some social network, how do you determine how connected two people X and Y are? This seems clearly an important general notion for social networks, with some tricky details to work out.

Peter Caputa has obviously been experimenting with eurekster (and talking about it in his eureksterblog!) longer than I, and he has a number of good observations. Responding to my post, he mentions that they're still trying to decide what degree of friend to use for re-ranking search results. I wonder if they've considered using decayed influence. I.e., my friends have a lot of influence, their friends have somewhat less, and so on out to my four- or five-hop friends who have very little influence (at least individually; collectively they might still guide me toward the meme of the moment).

Eurekster: a social search engine.

From the material on the web site, eurekster lets members set up social networks friendster-style (though without all that personal info stuff). as you search the internet, eurekster observes which links you follow. then when your friends do similar searches, eurekster promotes links in their results that you clicked on. and vice-versa of course. The result, presumably, is a sort of community-determined idea of what links are good.

The world is abuzz with orkut, the latest friendster (other recent friendsters include tribe and myspace). They're all similar in certain ways, but with various differences; orkut though has something new: your friends can rate how trusty/cool/sexy you are anonymously. This many2many post discusses the artificiality of these social networking tools' insistence on explicitness, and you see it especially in who we "friend" and what we say about them.