[Bitcoin-development] Social network integration (brainstorm)

[Bitcoin-development] Social network integration (brainstorm)

[Wendell]

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 ;)

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Social network integration (brainstorm)

[Mike Hearn]

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>
> 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.


I guess these days most Facebook/G+/Twitter users are logged in from their
smartphone , so you'd implement it as a mobile app that gets API access via
the standard mobile frameworks. The UI flows for this are highly optimised
and very slick. Once you have API access to read/write the users profile
picture, your app can just wake up from time to time and check if the users
profile picture has changed. If it did, download the highest resolution
available, rewatermark and reupload.

The main sticking point I can see is that the user might end up losing
comments or likes on their primary photo, which would upset some people,
and they might end up with duplicates if the old one was not erased. The
Facebook API docs are notoriously poor - it's unclear to me whether an app
can edit a photo after it was uploaded, or whether it can only create new
ones (deleting photos requires whitelisting by Facebook).

To read the users watermarked address requires no API access or account,
though.

Probably you wouldn't want to watermark an actual Bitcoin address or key.
The capacity of social network photos to carry stegod data is very low due
to the incredibly high compression they go through. More likely you'd
encode a very short URL which contains a payment request and then users
would rotate their key from time to time at the hosting site.

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] Social network integration (brainstorm)

[Mats Henricson]

The Trsst project (Twitter + RSS + Google Reader = Trsst social network)
has some interesting ideas:

http://www.trsst.com/paper/

Quote:

   In Trsst, every user account is a digital wallet. Authors and
   individual pieces of content can receive secure and anonymous
   micro-payments of digital crypto-currency, enabling long-
   envisioned content monetization schemes where authors receive
   small payments each time their content is consumed, shared,
   or "liked".

Mats

On 09/05/2013 10:23 AM, Wendell wrote:
> 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 ;)
> 
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