This seems interesting . . . . .
FOAFBot: IRC Community Support Agent
A FOAFBot instance is running on the #foaf channel on the OpenProjects IRC network, irc://irc.openprojects.net/foaf
The bot can be interrogated with simple questions about the properties of community members. People can be identified either by their IRC nick, full name, or email address:
<edd> foafbot, edd’s name
<foafbot> edd’s name is ‘Edd Dumbill’, according to Dan Brickley,
Anon35, Niel Bornstein, Jo Walsh, Dave Beckett, Edd Dumbill,
Matt Biddulph, Paul Ford
So I found myself being dragged into a tedious pissing contest (please contain your surprise) on a mailing list (I have since unsubscribed: if people have nothing to contribute, why can’t they just shut up?), and in the course of it I was sent a URL from http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y22052D71. Seems my antagonist thought I could be more pleasant as I pointed out that his project’s manual pages were wrong, the documentation was lacking, and no one seemed to have any answers.
Whatever. I found this ShorterLink stuff somewhat interesting and the FOAF stuff even more so.
Perhaps a non-commercial variant of Amazon’s friends list . . . .
And now I have my own ShorterLink.