Adding services to the 'also on' field in user profiles?

March 4, 2010 10:15 AM

A (Shetland) pony? Adding more services to the 'also on' field in user profiles?

Forgive me as I'm sure this has come up before, but alas my searching has failed me. I'm wondering what the protocol is for adding additional services to the 'also on' feature in user profiles. Specifically (for me) I'd like PRX and LibriVox on the list, but I'm also wondering in general how services get added..

posted by Lutoslawski to Feature Requests at 10:15 AM (21 comments total)

We should add this to the FAQ, since it comes up a lot. There is a page on the MeFi Wiki where you can add suggested services along with a demo URL of what your homepage there looks like. We periodically review that page and add new ones every so often.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:18 AM on March 4, 2010

There's a page on the MeFi wiki about this. Basically we go through and do a sweep every so often. The site has to be a site in which you can have a profile. More detail on the wiki page. I'll add it to the faq.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:21 AM on March 4, 2010

MOD JINX!
posted by Grither at 10:27 AM on March 4, 2010

Great! Thanks guys.
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:30 AM on March 4, 2010

I think I mentioned this a couple of years ago, but wouldn't it be easier to allow custom entries for services instead of periodic requests and sweeps? For example:

Website name: Metafilter
Your Profile URL: http://www.metafilter.com/user/62135

...which would then be displayed as an image of the Mefi favicon linking to the given profile. I'd think most people would know how to find their profile URL, and that way it could include niche sites and forums and such.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:38 AM on March 4, 2010

I think that might get tough to police, Rhaomi. People could link to literally any page on the web. And maybe that's ok, but that's not quite what we have in mind for this feature. Having some structure allows us to do things like the Social Explorer. If there are niche sites that are unique to you, you always have the option of putting it in your profile description.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:42 AM on March 4, 2010

Yeah, I considered it might be used for spam or worse. But then again, you can do all that and more with the freely-editable "About" space. Also, Metafilter profile pages aren't indexed by search engines, right? So any SEO-type stuff just wouldn't work.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:48 AM on March 4, 2010

hey guys there's a page on the wiki that oh never mind
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:49 AM on March 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

It's not just spam I'm worried about though. Right now there's a very high signal to noise ratio with those links. If you click one, you know you're going to get to a public profile page on a social service. If we open it up to anything, those links get diluted. So you 20% of the time you might click a link and get to something that requires a login. Or you might get a rickroll. Fun occasionally, but then you start viewing those social service links with the same skepticism as links in the about section. And maybe that's fine, but having those links in a separate space with separate rules gives them a different status, and you'd lose that if you opened it up completely I think.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:51 AM on March 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

What about sites that you have to log into to see a profile? Specifically, does anyone know if this would work with FetLife? I can't test this at work for obvious reasons - see here for MeTa thread about our group on FetLife.
posted by desjardins at 10:56 AM on March 4, 2010

well, pb sort of just answered that.
posted by desjardins at 10:57 AM on March 4, 2010

Hmmm, point taken. Especially after imagining someone with 78 social links cluttering up their profile page.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:05 AM on March 4, 2010

I like those links. It's weird how many places I'd never heard of until I checked them out through a user's profile. I don't think I would care to do that if it was free form.

There is room for a compromise between what pb is saying and Rhaomi's suggestion though. Maybe make an area in the profile that's not part of the Social sites, but that still does the favicon thing.

The one thing I dislike about the profile pages on most sites, meta included, is that most are boring.
posted by cjorgensen at 11:46 AM on March 4, 2010

Kinda related (Maybe?). Is there a favicon I can use when I link to my MeFi profile from my blog?
posted by white_devil at 12:18 PM on March 5, 2010

sure, here's the MeFi favicon as a gif.
posted by pb (staff) at 12:26 PM on March 5, 2010

Thanks pb!
posted by white_devil at 12:45 PM on March 5, 2010

Sorry to ask but is there a slightly bigger version like 32X32 that I can use with the social profiles widget in WP? That seems to be the default size for their icons.
posted by white_devil at 12:57 PM on March 5, 2010

Sorry, nope, I don't have a 32x32 version of the favicon handy. This might be a job for mathowie.
posted by pb (staff) at 1:34 PM on March 5, 2010

Ok.thanks!
posted by white_devil at 1:46 PM on March 5, 2010

Oh, just remembered the 57x57 iPhone Desktop Icon. That would probably look ok resized to 32x32.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:09 PM on March 5, 2010

Perfect!
posted by white_devil at 10:12 PM on March 5, 2010