Cross-site Friends List

[februaryfour]

Title
Cross-site Friends List

Short, concise description of the idea
Friends list that can read friends-locked entries posted on LJ-clones and other passworded places.

Full description of the idea
Because I keep getting poked to post this, I shall!While I can read my friends' Dreamwidth journals (and Insanejournals, and other journals) by adding

Comments

[soph]

I suggest that LJ support authenticated RSS feeds. This way, f-locked entries will still show up on my f-list, but will only show if I am logged in and authenticated on LJ.

There's no way to do this without support on the Dreamwidth side, because there's no way LJ can know when you're viewing your friends list on DW. It's DW itself that gets your friends page, not your browser.

It is possible to have authenticated RSS feeds where f-locked entries are exported in the feed, but that's not what you want, because if you were to put that URL into DW, then DW would follow that URL, pick up all your friends' locked entries, and publish them publicly as a syndicated feed. That would not be a good thing to do.

So, I'm sorry to say, this can't be done without DW support too. :/

[soph]

Right, and DW has been working on using that interface to do it. But, you see, there's no way that LiveJournal can know when you're reading an entry on DW without DW itself doing something special when you read.

Does that make sense?

[edit: Sorry for the confusion; I thought this entry was suggesting a way for DW to get entries off of LJ, not the other way round. Yes, of course, DW's own XML-RPC interface would work, just as it does for how DW themselves are implementing it.]

[jai_dit]

This would be a great feature to have. Not only would it benefit the users with its convenience, it would also benefit the site itself. This would give LiveJournal more pageviews that would ordinarily go to other sites. (That corresponds to more ad impressions for non-paid users.) Alternatively, if it were a paid-only feature, this would incentivize the sale of paid accounts.

So, net benefit all around.

[andy]

As much as I agree with this, working on this may not have the best "return of investment" indicator, so it may not make its way to development priorities (though I'm not in position to make the decision). :-(

[gerg]

I would greatly enjoy authenticated RSS support, implemented in general. I am against any more site-specific integration, just because resources are limited enough as is.

The issues with authenticated RSS are creating an account owner, and there will also be update delay and system load issues -- synsuck is a relatively intensive process and likely we'd have to do authenticated feeds less often than we do 'normal' feeds.

For real-world implementation, I'd think we'd have to limit users to a certain number of authenticated feeds (like with syndication points from Back In The Day,) because each authenticated syndicated account would only be open to one person (which could also create significant load on the remote site - if 100 LJ users have $syn_account on their friends list all with a different pasword, we have to retrieve that account 100 different times, just in case some users have different content.)

I've thought about authenticated RSS a lot (since I think about LJ RSS a lot) and I just can't picture a way to do it at this

[andy]

Because this is a feature that might generate much of server load, I think that it might go with pricing like that:

* $10 gives you a right to read 100 protected synfeeds for a year
* and you can pay additional $10 to read another 100, also for a year
* similarly to userpics packages, your synfeeds all expire at the same time -- i.e. you cannot initially set it the way that you enjoy 200 for the first year, and then it falls back to 100

In addition to that, once your synfeeds expire, they would be automatically marked deleted, subject to further work by moveucluster. If you renewed after that, you could go and undelete some of them, limited by your new quota.

Importing feeds from OPML en masse should also be considered.

[azurelunatic]

And it would not matter if someone had, say, something on their server that combined several feeds into 1, because it would only generate the work of 1 feed on LJ, if a bit higher-volume than some others?

(Though why someone would feel the need to read protected feeds on LJ if they were also technically capable of running them through their server, I do not know.)

[andy]

Someone doing a job on their server could as well post stuff to another account on LiveJournal, friends-only.

-1

[mlady_rebecca]

I don't understand this fully, but I do not want locked entries to ever be available outside of LJ.

Re: -1

[azurelunatic]

This seems to be a suggestion for pulling locked entries outside of LJ onto LJ, actually, rather than the reverse.

There actually already exists a method for someone who's not physically on LJ itself to sign in properly to an RSS reader, and have the RSS reader display locked entries, so long as the login credentials they've given are authorized to read that entry.

Re: -1

[trixieleitz]

As I understand the proposal, this feature would bring entries from other sites onto LJ, not vice versa.

Re: -1

[februaryfour]

I'm with you, I don't want locked entries to be available outside of LJ either. My suggestion goes the other way, and I want to be able to read other people's f-locked entries while I am on LJ, rather than have to open 4 different friends/reading pages.

[trixieleitz]

Users will be able to keep up with friends on other sites without having to manage multiple accounts, which sound good to me. If we have to have Facebook and Twitter integration, this seems like a logical fit with those features.