A new application we develope - your sugesstions (some questions)

[Kogan]

We want to develope an application that does something like that -

The main idea of the application we are building is to create a free-
items-exchange system based on the social network and its friends-
based connections.
The system will allow each user to post items at his possession that
he would like to give away, if anyone would take them.
User that needs some item (a couch for his new place, for example) can
query his circle of friends to see if anyone would like to give one
away. That is, the user looking for a couch asks his friends if anyone
has one, if there isn't anyone with a couch to give, the message
passes on to the user's friends' friends, and so on, until someone who
is willing to give a couch is found (or until the friends list depth
ends).

and we have a major design question -

How can we pass/deliver such a query among our friends (and second
level friends etc..)?
We thought of the following idea -

each user will save in it's own profile, items he suggests to give.
When a user decides that he needs an item for himslef, he runs on all
the profiles of his friends
(and their friends, and so on) and checks if this item is in their pre-
saved array of items they give.



If You have any ideas about improvent of the idea above, or any other
design idea regarding our application, we
will like to here !

Thnaks,
Maksim & Roey.

[Jason]

The current version of the OpenSocial API does not allow you to
retrieve the data for friends-of-friends. Even if it did, however,
this wouldn't be very useful to you unless these friends had your
application installed since most containers (including orkut) prevent
applications from accessing information about users who have not
installed the same app.

Have you considered showing all items for sale (from all users who
have installed the application and created a listing) and providing a
checkbox to show only friend listings? This way the application can
still be useful, even if the user doesn't have any friends who use
that application. On the other hand, if all of this user's friends
have installed your app, he can easily display only those listings
from his trusted circle. This is just an idea, of course.

- Jason

[Kogan]

Jason, thanks for the reply -
The thing is - we want to see "friends of friends" only of the people
that DID install our application.
So, as I read somewhere the current last open-social API supports it,
right?

and my second question - if the above is true, than - does Orkut
support it ???
(If I understand correctly what you wrote, it does...but I'm not sure)

On Jul 8, 1:32 am, Jason <apija...@google.com> wrote:
> The current version of the OpenSocial API does not allow you to
> retrieve the data for friends-of-friends. Even if it did, however,
> this wouldn't be very useful to you unless these friends had your
> application installed since most containers (including orkut) prevent
> applications from accessing information about users who have not
> installed the same app.
>
> Have you considered showing all items for sale (from all users who
> have installed the application and created a listing) and providing a
> checkbox to show only friend listings? This way the application can
> still be useful, even if the user doesn't have any friends who use
> that application. On the other hand, if all of this user's friends
> have installed your app, he can easily display only those listings
> from his trusted circle. This is just an idea, of course.
>
> - Jason
>

[Jason]

Version 0.8 of the OpenSocial specification allows you to fetch the
friends of an arbitrary user. orkut is currently using an
implementation of version 0.7, which only allows you to retrieve the
friends of the application's owner and current viewer.

orkut will eventually support applications written for version 0.8 of
the API once the implementation is complete. We'll post an update to
the orkut Developer Blog when more details are available.

http://orkutdeveloper.blogspot.com/

- Jason