Been reading about the Lazyweb for a while although never actually visited the site. (the rss feed seems borked)
Today I did visit and saw an idea for trying to connect with old friends. I had been thinking about this too but with other features such as a list of friends that you do have contact details for as well as a list of those you don’t.
So if say you are trying to Find John Q Murphy from your old school you list the names of guys/gals you know from that school and keep in contact with. Stick all them on a page that can get searched by google and whatnot. If John Q is looking for Mary O’Shea from your class and you have her name listed on your site he finds you too with a google search and sees you are looking for him. He also gets to see other people from the class listed. “Oh yeah Pat O’Brien ! I forgot about him. Oh he has a website, cool. ”
Maybe have an autoform that sends an email via your site after you authorize it so he can email Mary without knowing her address. With you authorizing this email it will prevent spamming via your site too.
If the people you know have websites you would of course list them too and any other details they want listed. The only issues would be too much detail as someone might try and steal that identity.
I’m not sure if something like this exists already as I’m too lazy to go and check.
(I started thinking about this again lately as recently I did a search for a friend and found he was last working in some college in the UK. I emailed his address but I don’t know is it still checked. I’m not a fan of read receipts )
Friendster.com?
Mmm, I think I have a friendster account and this isn’t it. Yes the idea is like friendster though but its not for getting people who don’t know each other to interact.
Its getting people who know each other and have lost contact to interact. And also its very public and without the need for logging in. Its search engine friendly too.
Come to think of it I guess its something like FOAF – http://www.foaf-project.org/
Andy Baio does something like this at his site. Not really an app of course, just a simple page with a list of names and a contact address, let google take care of the rest ;).