[OSM-talk] Friends

[Martijn van Exel]

I have a couple questions about friends. OSM friends, that is. It
seems a pretty hollow concept to me so I'd like to start a discussion
on how to make it more meaningful.
You can make friends on the website by adding someone as a friend. But
how and where are those relations leveraged and exposed?

I know:
* You can see who is your friend on your user page
* There seem to be (undocumented) make_friend and remove_friend API calls[1]
* The section about friends on the wiki says it doesn't do much[2].

I would like to know:
* Whether the friendee is notified about being friended by another user.
* Whether your / any user's friend info is exposed through the API.
* Whether there are any benefits to adding someone as a friend - other
than being able to see their home location if set.
* How many friend relations the database currently contains.
And most importantly:
* How could the OSM friend concept be made more meaningful?

Some ideas:
* Integrate with other social networks (find OSM friends through
Twitter / Facebook / ...)
* Being able to group-send messages to your friends.
* Having friend groups
I realize that these are some pretty big ideas and with my own limited
Rails skills I will probably not be able to make a significant dent in
implementing any of them. But before we get to that stage, let's have
a discussion about this topic. What are your ideas about OSM friends?

Martijn

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6/Command_Overview
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Web_front_end#Friends
-- 
martijn van exel
geospatial omnivore
1109 1st ave #2
salt lake city, ut 84103
801-550-5815
http://oegeo.wordpress.com