Google Summer of Code 2010 Student Ruturaj Dhekane Reports on a Project called "Finding People You Already Know"

Here is a new post written by one of our Google Summer of Code 2010 Students, Ruturaj Dhekane: 

"Hi All! I am Ruturaj Dhekane, a 2'nd year Masters student at the Indian Institute Of Technology, Kanpur, India. So this summer I have the fantastic opportunity to work under the mentorship of Brion Vibber on a project titled 'Finding People You Already Know'. The project is primarily to let new and existing users find their friends' OStatus accounts and subscribe to them. Additionally it will recommend them about potential friends by analysing their social interaction.
The federated nature of StatusNet social network makes it hard to find friends on other domains unless you explicitly know about it. A two pronged approach will be used to tackle this hurdle.
First approach known as 'Quick Connect' will allow users to tap into their contact lists on Google and Twitter and check for presence of these friends on the same domain as the user. Further the Google's Social Graph API will be used to find other public OStatus profiles of his friends registered on other domains.
The second approach called the 'Delayed Connect' will be a framework that will generate a users social graph. We would use StatusNets own API to retrieve friends lists on same and external domains. The plan is to analyse this graph on some parameters like subscriptions ,subscribers and even their location or profile information to recommend new friends to the user. This service is known as 'Delayed Connect' because the plan is to have incremental analysis of users social graph. Its not necessary that user be recommended new friends every day, but it can be delayed so that the user gets enough time to understand and mingle with his existing friends network.
There is a lot of research going on to study and understand Social Networks. Thanks to the open source nature of StatusNet and the wonderful StatusNet team I hope to see some theory in action! This is going to be really cool Summer!"

Stay tuned for more updates from our students and to hear the latest developments form the Google Summer of Code Projects!