Social network integration (brainstorm)
3 messages, 5 Sep 2013. Started by Wendell.
Wendell, Mike Hearn, Mats Henricson
Mike Hearn had a rather cool idea about watermarking images with Bitcoin addresses in order to facilitate auto-magically linking social networking profiles: apparently even without API access, reasonably large user images are available publicly via the major services (Facebook, Twitter).
Since this process would necessarily be somewhat manual and would of course be "undone" anytime the user changed his/her profile image, it is probably not a solution for everyone. But it seems that this could be a helpful way to at least _begin_ organizing Bitcoin around people and organizations in a way that is broadly familiar.
I haven't been able to get this to work myself, but Blockchain.info seems to offer sending 'coin via Facebook: https://blockchain.info/wallet/send-via
There is also the very cute Bitcoins With Friends: https://bitcoinswithfriends.com/
Most of the other apps that I have seen at one point or another have vanished. I recall reading that Facebook was not particularly friendly to them, hence the present interest in more subversive (?) ways of making those connections.
Again, I am not 100% sure that this is the correct place for it, but I'm opening this thread to other such ideas in case anyone else wants to discuss it. Our motivation is making Bitcoin easier to use, and we suspect that even imperfect social network support will move us closer to that goal.
-wendell
grabhive.com | twitter.com/grabhive | gpg: 6C0C9411
Quoted text (5 lines)
> Re-orienting Bitcoin around people and companies is something we wanted to do for a long time. How do you get an address linked to a personal profile? Someone was asking me about this last month and I suggested watermarking addresses into social network profile pictures. The advantage of that approach is every social network supports profile pictures and big ones like Facebook and Twitter allow querying of somebodies picture without needing any API or user authentication, eg: > > https://graph.facebook.com/i.am.the.real.mike/picture?type=large > > So obviously with such a thing you can send to any Facebook user who has configured their profile correctly. There's a library that implements watermarking that can survive social network recompression, but it is (doh) written in Java ;)
Quoted text (4 lines)
> > Since this process would necessarily be somewhat manual and would of > course be "undone" anytime the user changed his/her profile image, it is > probably not a solution for everyone.
I guess these days most Facebook/G+/Twitter users are logged in from their smartphone , so you'd implement it as a mobile app that gets API access via the standard mobile frameworks. The UI flows for this are highly optimised and very slick. Once you have API access to read/write the users profile picture, your app can just wake up from time to time and check if the users profile picture has changed. If it did, download the highest resolution available, rewatermark and reupload.
The main sticking point I can see is that the user might end up losing comments or likes on their primary photo, which would upset some people, and they might end up with duplicates if the old one was not erased. The Facebook API docs are notoriously poor - it's unclear to me whether an app can edit a photo after it was uploaded, or whether it can only create new ones (deleting photos requires whitelisting by Facebook).
To read the users watermarked address requires no API access or account, though.
Probably you wouldn't want to watermark an actual Bitcoin address or key. The capacity of social network photos to carry stegod data is very low due to the incredibly high compression they go through. More likely you'd encode a very short URL which contains a payment request and then users would rotate their key from time to time at the hosting site.
The Trsst project (Twitter + RSS + Google Reader = Trsst social network) has some interesting ideas:
Quote:
In Trsst, every user account is a digital wallet. Authors and individual pieces of content can receive secure and anonymous micro-payments of digital crypto-currency, enabling long- envisioned content monetization schemes where authors receive small payments each time their content is consumed, shared, or "liked".
Mats
On 09/05/2013 10:23 AM, Wendell wrote:
Quoted text (35 lines)
> Mike Hearn had a rather cool idea about watermarking images with Bitcoin addresses in order to facilitate auto-magically linking social networking profiles: apparently even without API access, reasonably large user images are available publicly via the major services (Facebook, Twitter). > > Since this process would necessarily be somewhat manual and would of course be "undone" anytime the user changed his/her profile image, it is probably not a solution for everyone. But it seems that this could be a helpful way to at least _begin_ organizing Bitcoin around people and organizations in a way that is broadly familiar. > > I haven't been able to get this to work myself, but Blockchain.info seems to offer sending 'coin via Facebook: > https://blockchain.info/wallet/send-via > > There is also the very cute Bitcoins With Friends: > https://bitcoinswithfriends.com/ > > Most of the other apps that I have seen at one point or another have vanished. I recall reading that Facebook was not particularly friendly to them, hence the present interest in more subversive (?) ways of making those connections. > > Again, I am not 100% sure that this is the correct place for it, but I'm opening this thread to other such ideas in case anyone else wants to discuss it. Our motivation is making Bitcoin easier to use, and we suspect that even imperfect social network support will move us closer to that goal. > > -wendell > > grabhive.com | twitter.com/grabhive | gpg: 6C0C9411 > >> Re-orienting Bitcoin around people and companies is something we wanted to do for a long time. How do you get an address linked to a personal profile? Someone was asking me about this last month and I suggested watermarking addresses into social network profile pictures. The advantage of that approach is every social network supports profile pictures and big ones like Facebook and Twitter allow querying of somebodies picture without needing any API or user authentication, eg: >> >> https://graph.facebook.com/i.am.the.real.mike/picture?type=large >> >> So obviously with such a thing you can send to any Facebook user who has configured their profile correctly. There's a library that implements watermarking that can survive social network recompression, but it is (doh) written in Java ;) > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Learn the latest--Visual Studio 2012, SharePoint 2013, SQL 2012, more! > Discover the easy way to master current and previous Microsoft technologies > and advance your career. Get an incredible 1,500+ hours of step-by-step > tutorial videos with LearnDevNow. Subscribe today and save! > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=58041391&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk > _______________________________________________ > Bitcoin-development mailing list > Bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge•net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development >