Joule
(This is mainly for syndication, since people reading this on LJ will mostly know it all already.)
I have a program, which has been running since August 2002, whose purpose is to grab a list of which LiveJournal users are reading a given LiveJournal and store the differences over time. Currently, it can produce the results for a given LiveJournal in one of three formats:
* a chart in HTML
* a bar graph in HTML
* RSS.
I will be introducing a PNG line graph soon.
There are currently between three and five thousand hits on the HTML version a day and (probably) about the same usage of the RSS version, based on the usage from a few months ago. (I've currently lost read access to the logs on that server, so I can't say for sure.)
Joule gets its data from a rather ad hoc textfile-based feed from the LJ servers. I had hoped when LJ started supporting FOAF that I could get the data that way, but FOAF only tells you who a user's friends are; it's not designed to report the inverse information.
Now, I'm okay with using the format as it stands, but people have very often asked me whether I can make Joule work with other journalling/social networking systems. I'd love to do this, but I'd need to figure out what format the information would come from their server in. Would it be best to standardise on LJ's ad hoc format, or an adapted form of FOAF, or something new? Does anyone have any advice?
And if anyone knows people behind journalling/social networking systems who would like to work with me on getting Joule to talk to their system, I'd love to hear from them. (Mugshot people, perhaps?)