Whoisi Isn't Just Another Friend Aggregator

by Lisa Hoover - Jun. 30, 2008Comments (0)

As the people you know sign up for more and more social networking sites, using an aggregator to keep up with their activity has become a necessity.┬а The trouble is, typically you must bug your friends to sign up for the service you want to use to follow them, which is a hassle for everyone. Whoisi.com is a new service Mozilla's Open Source Evangelist, Chris Blizzard, developed in his spare time. It's user-friendly, doesn't require you to hassle your friends into signing up, and, as expected, completely open.

Whoisi is a lot like FriendFeed in concept, and a lot like a wiki in execution. After a quick sign-up process, it's up to the user to add URLs and information about the people they want to follow, not the other way around, although unlike other services, it's not required to create an account in order to follow people. With Whoisi, you also aren't asked for access to your email account so the service can comb your address book for other users you may know. Instead, you build a page for people you want to follow that's then editable by other Whoisi users who can add additional links, tags, and nicknames.

Blizzard acknowledges the potential that people can easily deface someone's page and says he is "collecting history data so that I can provide history for a particular person and it should make it easy to undo damage created by would-be vandals. I just havenтАЩt added the History link to a person yet."

One of Blizzard's self-proclaimed "rules" for the site is the use of Open Data so "if thereтАЩs information that anyone explicitly adds to the site, they should be able to extract it and use it for any purpose they want." Currently available open APIs include scripts that allow users to extract information for a single person based on user ID, and one that permits the extraction of the whole person and site database.

Currently Whoisi supports Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Picasa, and generic Rss and Atom feeds, though Blizzard expects to add several more sites in the future.