Observant people will have noticed a friend-list appear on the side of my blog. Changing my blog around is way overdue for me. I need to take a few hours out some time and work on the CSS. I still don’t have all the useful stuff that I had at my old blog site. One of those is a friend-list. I’ve never actually been a fan of friend-lists. I hate the idea of missing people out. And I think that’s where Whooiz can come in.
Whooiz is a start-up by Clarke (I want to call him Monkey, but I won’t) and Cameron, and the idea about it is to be able to keep your profile information in one place, linking to it as you require. It’s a nice idea – I know that I keep a list of places who know my address, so that if I move I can make sure that I let them all know. Whooiz might help for keeping profile stuff up to date. Of course, it would be nice if it could do it behind the scenes, so that you go to LinkedIn or FriendsReunited and just see text there as if you had entered it, except that it’s actually populated by a call to whooiz. That would work really well for me, although I’m sure those other sites would need to tweak their systems to actually allow it. Perhaps Whooiz could partner with them, and sites could start to be ‘powered by whooiz’.
Another thing I want is to be able to have full control over the display of my profile, friends list, contact information, etc. I’ve got my friends list appearing over to the side, and I’ve set the heading colour and background to be the same colour as the background that I have there. But what I’d rather do is to tell the heading not to display. I’d also like to change the font of the text which says who the people are, even have the names removed, replacing them with alt and title text for the images, or put them underneath the images… have the images in two columns perhaps, that kind of thing. All feasible with CSS. Even have Whooiz give me the details in XML, and then let me use my own JavaScript to place them. The list shows a random <some number> friends (friendz?) from my list, and it could be neat to have a call to give me a new random friend that isn’t currently displayed (I don’t mean making new friends, I mean just grabbing one of my existing friends for displaying). Then I could have a bit of JavaScript (or have Whooiz provide it) so that my friend list could sit their cycling through them. I could put them into a live.com (or sidebar) gadget – kind of like a “how longz it been?” list, prompting me to catch up with friends I haven’t contacted for a while.
I like things like whooiz – the possibilities are cool. I just need to come with the starting ideas myself, instead of finding ways to help improve others’.
