I have been posting less on my Social Technology and other sites recently, because I have been doing some serious programming.  I am writing page generators and editors in Pyth0n, to support a large number of web pages which have a conspicuous material “above the fold” and lots of links to other pages in the collection.  These collections of pages will form complete graphs (the technical term for what people usually call networks), so that I can perform advanced mathematical tricks on them.`

I will post more about these programs as I develop them.  I anticipate putting working prototypes of them up on this site in a week or two from now.   They will be open source, and have documentation in the form of  an example collection of pages.  I am also going to submit them to SourceForge as a project.   — dpw

I decided to post the fact that there will be a completely interactive real-time and personalized question-and-answer interface instead of user profiles to be filled out. That is almost revealing too much already. Other social networking services could easily decide to use this approach, though I doubt they would be as sophisticated as what I plan.

I also decided to post a few words about the chaining method for growing social networks. This is less likely to be understood by potential competitors, so I decided to mention it.

I do not want to say much more. I do not want to tell people any more details about the user interface for fear that the competition would adopt them.

I don’t know how to interest potential partners and investors without telling them more, so I propose the use of non-disclosure agreements. But even that may not be enough. Sometimes only a hint is necessary.

A cautionary tale is the story of Smalltalk, Apple and Windows. The management at Xerox PARC asked Adele Goldberg to show Steve Jobs of Apple the Smalltalk system with its revolutionary windows interface.  Goldberg refused, saying that would be giving away the shop – even a brief demonstration would be enough to show Apple what to do.

Xerox management ordered Adele Goldberg to give the demonstration, which she was coerced into doing despite her protests. Steve Jobs saw a well-developed windows interface, the first one ever developed, and the rest is history. Everyone knows Apple and Microsoft’s Windows, few have heard of Smalltalk.

All this interferes with programming, though I am making some progress.  I am not experienced with animations, and have not done much graphics, either, but I can and will.  I have learned that PIL, the Python Imaging Library has some disadvantages, such as a reluctance to antialias lines.   You can fake it by running the image through a smoothing filter, but that has side effects.   Better is aggdraw, but there is a catch: it is only available under Linux.  I use Windows, though I have some Linux experience.   For those in my situation, having a Windows machine that I don’t want to screw around with, you might check out wubi.  You can get it from http://wubi-installer.org/.  It installs a complete Ubuntu Linux in a large Windows file, so you don’t have to repartition your hard drive and risk some catastrophe or other.   It works fine under Windows 7 (and earlier versions) and is smart enough to install either the 32 or 64 bit version depending on your machine.

Anyway, I’ll use aggdraw with Python on this nice Linux system, and see what I can do.  Unless, of course, some kind person accepts my offer to do illustrations and animations for me, in exchange for ad revenue.   See http://socialtechnology.ca/wordpress/make-pretty-get-revenue/ — I’d much rather someone else do it, but I can do it myself if I have to.

By the way, using StumbleUpon in my spare time, such as when eating lunch, I notice that I tend to ignore websites without content that is immediately eye-catching and informative.  This tells me a lot about what my own websites should look like.  I highly recommend this to other website owners.  Stumble for a while and see what catches your eye, then look over your own site and see if it would catch your own attention if it wasn’t yours.  If you are not already a user, go to http://www.StumbleUpon.com/ and sign up, I recommend it. — dpw

Why am I getting so many registrations from Russia?

I hope that means what I think it means.  I did try to learn some Russian once, but I didn’t learn very much and it hasn’t stayed with me.  I never did learn Cyrillic.  So I am trusting that Google Translate knows what it is talking about.  Anyway, that is the question — why am I getting so many registrations from Russia.  I’d like to think that someone over there understands that I am saying something which matters.   Let’s hope so.   My thanks to all of you who have registered, from wherever.  — dpw

Most interesting to me are animations. On an old page, http://www.SocialTechnology.ca/oldpages/diagrams.html I posted “before” and “after” diagrams of social networks:

image of social network before transformation

image of social network after transformation

What I want to do is create an animation, probably an animated GIF file, to show how the “before” network is changed by some social tech tools to the “after” network.

To do this, I need to create a number of images showing successive stages in the transformation. This can be done using the Python Imaging Library to create the individual image files, then Image Magick to turn them into an animation.

So, that is one thing I am working on. I am also working on Chapter Fourteen of the online book about social tech missions to Africa, at http://socialtechmissionaryorganization.socialtechnology.ca/ — that chapter is turning out to be a lot of work, but should be interesting when finished, probably tomorrow.

Similarity = MatchCount / Length(ShortestList)

Also, looking for similar people, people with the same interests, or same kinds of page approval as you is all very well, useful for some purposes, but don’t expect to actually like or communicate well with such people.  People with too much in  common often disagree and often have communications problems.

What you really want to know are people similar to those who like and communicate well with people like you.