My favourite talk at the FOWA was Matt Biddulph talking about his experience with Dopplr which is a fantastic little service (and I was shown today that the colors change EVEN on the favicon.ico when you are in a different location!!!).
Matt’s talk was high level, but he managed to keep it interesting and it wasn’t about pimping Dopplr.
He also released identity matcher, a new open source project that allows you to import social graphs! Now we can all work together on this instead of reinventing the wheel:
This code, extracted from the Rails codebase of dopplr.com, extends your User model with methods to pull in social network information from sites such as GMail, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and any site supporting appropriate Microformats.
This is an alpha-quality plugin. It was extracted from our codebase at the start of October 2007 and may still contain dopplr-specific code (although we tried to avoid that).
The code is just one file with a few includes and you can now matches_identities in your Rails model. Of course, you can abstract out the Rails stuff and just have a library to do the matching. Very nice indeed.
Now I just want the option to say “if someone shares their stuff with me on Dopplr, and they are friends with me via another service (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) just go ahead and share back automatically!”
more on the FOWA
