[Bitcoin-development] Social network integration (brainstorm)

[Wendell <w@grabhive.com>]

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 ;)