1) showing the number of degrees of seperation between you and any other user, and what that path is
2) showing you statistical info such as the average number of hops it takes you to get to every other user, and showing the top ranked people - the "center" of the LJ universe
3) other silly things, like a graphical map of your friends and their locations... the ability to map your friends on it, your friends' friends... etc
the hardest part of writing this app would be getting an entire database of lj users and the stuff listed in their user profile. that could be kind of hairy. i can think of two ways of doing this:
1) asking the lj developers to provide an image of all the user profiles. but i don't think this would really be appropriate. after all, what i'd be writing would essentially be a toy.
this leaves me with:
2) write a mini app that slowly spiders across all the user info's it can find, using "friends" and "friends of" listings to make its own image. i see two problems with this.
- it would be an incomplete listing. it wouldn't find journals of people who aren't friends of anyone, because it would have no way of getting to them.
- in order to be polite, it would probably take a month or so for the spider to get user info on some 130,000 active users.
i think people would have a lot of fun playing around with something like this, and i know i'd have a lot of fun writing it. i'd appreciate any suggestions or comments as to how i might work through this hurdle.
