LiveJournal Meme Development

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 18:57:49 GMT

Is there any way to obtain a list of a myspace user's friends for use in a meme? So far I've got a nifty bit of PHP that can extract the first 40 or so, but the rest of the friends are behind a bit of java that I don't know how to get around. Any ideas?

Meme Idea

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 01:11:15 GMT

A meme idea (assuming it's not already in existence): a LJ tool that tells you the frequency of use of each of a user's icons.

Newbie Query

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 17:48:12 GMT

Hi guys, i'm new to the memedev community so please be gentle. Can anyone tell me the basics of how to write a meme that would allow the user to input their username and then to return the names of 10 of the people from the friends list with random information selected from an array next to each of them? Preferably in PHP if possible?

I have been trying to get my head around it but am not even sure where I should be starting! Any help greatly appreciated.

Warmest wishes.

Steven

LJ comment stats queries.

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 22:13:29 GMT

A while back I used the following to generate my LJ comment stats...

http://mpn.ath.cx/~mpn/code/lj/ljstats/

...but now I find that it doesn't include recent comments. The exporting of comments doesn't include any comments by the more recent friends I have at all. Does anyone know of a more recent one?

Also, I made an entry here a long time back and someone mentioned that it wasn't possible 'right now, but should be easy to implement' or something of the sorts: I was wondering if it would be possible to get a similar meme which shows which LiveJournals YOU have commented in. If it is possible, would it be easy to figure out?

Where to post completed memes?

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 18:04:09 GMT

Hey all,

Just been looking through the messages here and I'm not seeing a lot of completed memes posted. Not wanting to step on any toes so; Is it ok to post completed memes to this community?

I've just release my first one last night. :)

Hey~

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 18:28:01 GMT

Hey, i don't know if this is allowed. But...

I was wondering if you guys wanted to Affiliate with us.

Simple, yet I'm not sure where to start

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 19:48:40 GMT

I simply want to pull the newest 5-10 members to join a specific community using php and list them on an external page, It's not much but I'm baffled, any chance of some help? pointers?

Thanks in advance

Tentative post

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 02:19:47 GMT

Hi all. Was reading through the posts in this community with interest, and wouldn't have posted were it not for this post by _imran_ causing me to think that maybe there is a place in meme-creation where I can do something. I have a few ideas and I'm not entirely useless at html / design side of things, so we'll see. On with the ideas...

There've been a number of posts on the subject of compatibility based on shared interests. The possibility of finding some unknown other, or group, who share a large number of your recorded interests is clearly something that would be intriguing to many, but is sadly impractical given the size of the LJ directory. Clearly we need to find a way to reduce the number of users to be searched through.

I've thought of / stolen a couple of possibilities beyond the friends list (which is rather limited since I'm presuming that much of the curiousity comes from possibly meeting new friends):

searching the membership of a given community

searching within a given geography

searching the friends list of a given user

searching the subscription list of a given syndicated feed (e.g. apod)

starting with a given interest (or combination of interests) and then searching for the best match amongst users who have that interest

searching the last X journals to be updated

searching the friend of friends list

I strongly suspect several of these wouldn't be feasible. Of all of them, I particularly hope that it would be possible to start with a given interest, use that to preselect a number of livejournal users and then proceed from there. For example, from my interest list, I could perhaps choose "first world war" - an interest that my interest data page tells us that I share with 39 other users (although the data about the interest itself seems to disagree, saying that 32 users and 4 communities - i.e. 36 entities - share the interest, if someone can explain that). These 39 (or 32) users could then be analysed to find that user with whom I share the most interests.

There's still a problem, in that if I were to enter 'music' as the initial filtering interest, the code would still be presented with 1,135,483 users to analyse, which although greatly less that LJ's 7,356,123 users (as of today, right now), still represents a very significant load. Any meme that proceeded along these lines would have to either reject any interest that didn't bring the numbers down to a reasonable figure, or possibly offer to cross reference the list with another chosen interest (i.e. narrow the list down to users interested in music AND art AND red wine, say).

Certain of these ideas - for example searching within a given geography / community / interest - could be extended to searching for people with the most friends in common, or people who are members of the same communities as the user, or members who follow the same feeds.

On a completely different note, I have another idea for a very simple meme that might be of interest to someone with the necessary skills: I'm sure you're all aware that June 2005 is seeing a permanent account sale. I was weak and craven and greedy, and I wondered how many among my friendslist had been similarly so. If the information is available, it strikes me that it'd be a fairly simple meme to extract account type information from a user's friends list and turn this into a chart, showing the proportion of free, paid, permanent and early adopters amongst one's friends list (and for extra interest, comparing the distribution to that of LJ as a whole, possibly including a measure of eccentricity).

Finally, I've recently started programming 'properly' (as opposed to picking up bits here and there, doing a few exercises and then running out of steam because I didn't have anything real to apply it to) - picking up Rexx / Object Oriented Rexx and then actually using it for work, using it to write some fairly straightforward mainframe scripting / check applications. This has spurred me to want to pick up something more mainstream, but it's also taught me that there's no point unless I can find something that I'll be motivated to apply what I learn to. Hence, my question: I have a website on a server that supports PHP hosting - is it worth my while trying to learn PHP for meme-type applications, or is it not really powerful enough for that?

Thanks for reading, if there's nothing worthwhile among my ideas, I'll not be bitter. This forum for collaberation is a great idea and some of the names I see attached to it have been responsible for some excellent memes. Keep up the good work!

Tue, 31 May 2005 22:56:02 GMT

does anyone know if it's possible to write a meme that will search within a specified community to find the user(s) with the most interests in common with you?

i'd really like to see one that searches for this in the entire livejournal database, but i see from a few posts down that it would be pretty much impossible to search a database that size (which sucks cos i was hoping to find my soulmate ;)).

but limiting the search within a community wouldn't be too unreasonable, would it? does anyone know if a meme of this kind exist?

thanks :)

Yadis

Tue, 17 May 2005 12:50:10 GMT

A Danga-developed distributed identity system, tentatively named 'Yadis' (now 'OpenID'), has been announced on lj_dev.

Meme developers might be interested in the part where bradfitz mentions that future implications include "offsite LJ toys that know who you are, without asking for your password". It's definitely worth checking out.

Error while using XML-RPC

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 18:00:44 GMT

Hi,
I tried to use one of the LJ methods described in
http://www.livejournal.com/doc/server/ljp.csp.xml-rpc.protocol.html
using AppleScript. But I get an "invalid password" error even though
the password is correct. what am I doing wrong?

tell application "http://www.livejournal.com/interface/xmlrpc"
call xmlrpc {method name:"LJ.XMLRPC.getdaycounts", parameters:{username:"turbolaserguy", password:"(my password)"}}
end tell

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 16:46:37 GMT

I'm looking for a WORKING version of a meme that tells you what user has the most interests in common with you.

Keeping socket open?

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 06:47:18 GMT

Has anyone had any success keeping the socket open when running code that talks to the LiveJournal server? I'm sending HTTP requests of the form:
GET http://www.livejournal.com/blah/blah HTTP/1.1
and even though I'm sending the "HTTP/1.1" bit, the connection will get dropped randomly and have to be reopened.

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 10:44:14 GMT

Apologies for the spam.

I am conducting research into what degree the need for affiliation plays in an individual's involvement in internet memes, LJ memes in particular. I am looking for people with an interest in memes to take 10 minutes to complete a questionnaire here, regarding the use of memes and their social orientation. The definitions of meme are left deliberately obscure, it is more about your own definition.

Also, if any of you generous peeps out there who wouldn't mind pimping the questionnaire to your friends list I would be truely grateful, the more the merrier!

Thanks very much, and apologies if this is not appropriate for the community.

Comments Stats, Revisited.

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 15:54:59 GMT

Much like the last post, I'm not really up to scratch with how LJ memes work nor how this would be done, however, after revisiting the comments stats meme (found here), I was wondering if it would be possible to get a similar meme which shows which LiveJournals YOU have commented in. If it is possible, would it be easy to figure out?

Current Music Meme

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 03:13:16 GMT

Let me preface this by saying that I know nothing about memes or how theyre made but I was wondering if the following were

A.) possible
B.) done
C.) or if anyone was interesting

Idea: a meme that would sorto through your journal archive and collect up and list all of one's current music entires...

LJ Account Verification

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 17:02:23 GMT

So while brainstorming a new meme, I ran up against an issue that has been dealt with before, but that doesn't have a satisfactory solution yet: how do you verify that a person actually owns the LJ account they claim to?

The method used in the past goes as follows:

Provide your LJ username.
Go edit your userinfo (or make a public post) and add a certain keyword or number.
Click "verify" so that the script can retrieve your userinfo (or latest public post) and check for the keyword or number.
If keyword or number is there, accept. If not, reject.
Go edit your userinfo (or the post) and remove the extraneous keyword or number because it's annoying to have it there.

This is cumbersome and deters casual users who don't want to invest that much time in a "stupid meme." Here's what would be ideal:

Provide your LJ username.
Click "verify" so that the script can somehow magically check if you're telling the truth.

Obviously this has flaws such as that it relies on magically determining veracity.

A second option is to ask the user to provide their LJ username and password, and use the LJ protocol behind the scenes to log into LJ as them. This, however, requires that the user trust you with their LJ info, which is both a bad idea and an even bigger deterrent, even if we swear up and down that we won't cache that info or use it for anything other than verification.

Here's my proposal: we could set up a centralized "MemePass" system so that people only have to verify their LJ account once, and we can all use a central username/password database in the future to determine if they've been verified. Anyone think this is useful enough to commit time and energy to? I'd be willing to design, write, and host the system over the next few weeks if you all think it would get used.

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 05:34:28 GMT

Can someone give me the thing that tells you how many comments everyone on your friends list has given you, or make one? I saw it somewhere, but i dont remember where it was. Please help, thanks!

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 07:26:21 GMT

could anyone link me to that one meme, where you fill out all sorts of questions and then it'll give you the compatibility ranking you have w/ all your LJ friends who have filled the same thing out. it appears as a bar graph. i believe theres to graphs, one has to do w/ general interests, and i think the other has to do w/ date-ability. or something like that.

Proposal: something based on interests rather than friends

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 16:01:35 GMT

This may have already been suggested or even developed, but how about a web-"toy" that uses the user's interests list to search LiveJournal for whichever users or communities share the most common interests? Kind of the reverse of _imran_'s Popular Interests analyzer.

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 05:42:41 GMT

In the spirit of the previous post, I want to invite people to share data with me. I particularly need user Locations. You know, the location users say they're from. Once it's available via XML or plaintext, we could abandon the data-sharing perhaps, but right now I'd set up whatever swapping relationship we could get going.

Proposal about meme development

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 22:42:08 GMT

I think the process of creating/running a meme can be split into the following things,

1) The initial idea.
2) The design/look of the meme
3) The coding
4) The hosting

Given the number of programmers and inventive people on lj I'm surprised there aren't far more cool memes. I think the main reason for this is that it's uncommon for there to be someone who can do all four.

Hence I propose to tackle this in the following way, I'd like to promote this community as a place where people who can provide any of these things to meet each other.

With regards to the fourth, I'm planning to obtain commercial hosting for my own memes which I hope will be self-funding by adverts (any excess profits generated by ads will be donated to charities/non-profits). Once it's up and running I'll be happy to host memes for other people too, a side advantage of this will be that lots of different memes can share cached data speeding up everyones memes and reducing the load on lj.

What do people think ?

Sun, 15 Aug 2004 18:03:10 GMT

Greetings, though I do not have any programming skills that would allow me to develope memes. I do have an ongoing idea about one. Please note that this is only discussion, I'm not asking nor begging for this to be made, only seeing if it's possible.

Well here is the "game" thing I've been working on,

Base rules

A weird game I made up overnight, let's all play along! This entry right here will be the master list, and the number of zombies will be updated accordingly. If this entry starts getting too far away to find, I suggest you either bookmark it, or I will make a small webpage. All entries that the rules refer to do not include your own posts.

Zombie Infestation

Number of Zombies: 1
Updated: 8/15/04
10:47 AM PST

Zombie Name: Iniko
People infected: 0
Infected By: none

Beginning step
If you are a zombie, ignore steps 1-6

Step 1
If the number of Zombies is greater than the replies to the entry you are reading, then you are Killed by the zombies. See step 4

Step 2
If the number of Zombies is equal to the replies to the post you are reading, then you are bitten by the zombies. See step 4

Step 3
However, if the number of zombies is less than the replies to the the post you are reading... Then you escape infection, for now...

Step 4
You have been killed by a Zombie!
The zombies carry a virus that turns you into one of the undead Immediately after death. See step 6

Step 5
You've been bitten by a zombie!
You choose to either kill yourself or become one of the undead! See step 6

Step 6
Help the Zombie Infestation spread and grow by copying this into your journal (if possible). If you become a zombie, send an email to metalmagus50[at]msn.com with the word "zombie in the subject line to help keep track of our numbers! Also, please let the person know in their journal if you were infected or not, so they can proporly keep track of their own stats.

Feel free to edit for length, as long as a link to the rules is posted as well

It's sort of a game that is played like a virus that spreads if you know what I mean. I have hopes that this could be turned into a script that allows for automation, but no expectations of it actually doing so.

If I knew a little more html I'd try making a rudimentary program myself that basicallyy worked, But as I said, my knowledge in programming isn't that great :-/.

Well, nice meeting you guys :)

Other Uses for AI::Categorizer?

Wed, 11 Aug 2004 23:59:51 GMT

Okay, that uses a Bayes algorithm to lump people into two categories based on the contents of their journals, almost exactly how many spam filters figure out if incoming email is junk or not. The Vote Predictor is essentially proof-of-concept, but I think there's a ton of possibilities for using AI::Categorizer for these dumb little memes.

One idea I have is to use it to suggest communities you might want to join. It would return the top 3 or so communities whose members' journals most closely (in a Bayesian sort of way) match your journal. However, I don't know exactly how to approach this. I can't have it analyze every freaking community, obviously. Any ideas how I could select about 100 communities to include?

Also... Any other ideas for how to apply AI::Categorizer to meme building, or anything LJ-related?