Cal
icon
star

Buddy Cards

August 14th, 2006 by Narendra
Do you comment on blogs?

30 Boxes is a great way to keep track of your web stuff and it allows you to easily maintain and share your identity (who you are and stuff you have on the web). When you comment on blogs that have Buddy Cards enabled 30 Boxes displays a nice pop up with information about you.

If you register with 30 Boxes you can control the information displayed with your account settings. If you prefer to mask your identity we can remove you from our system but remember, any blog with Buddy Cards is interested in knowing more about the people who make comments!

sample buddy card
The buddy card has basic information like name and location as well as information about other websites where you are active (like a blog or MySpace). If you have a photo stream, that is visible as well.
Additionally, 30 Boxes lets people know if a Buddy Card is “verified” with a simple colored icon. Yellow is unverified, green is verified. A numerical rating of 1-9 is also visible and indicates that person’s social ranking. Taken together, we call it a Buddy Card’s Truthiness Rating.
Do you publish a blog?

Now you can show more information about who is commenting. We are rolling out a series of plugins that allow your blog to look and feel more like a colorful social network. You can collect the Buddy Cards from people who post on your blog and encourage people to be transparent with their identity.

Our “truthiness” rating lets you know when people have verified their Buddy Card and provides a slick ajax interface to learn more about people who comment.

sample buddy card
Available platforms:
WordPress 2.0 (currently in limited beta — get the plugin here!) — download the plugin, unzip it, ftp to your /wp-content/plugins directory, and activate it under your blog’s Admin > Plugins menu. That’s it. You can also customize several options from Admin > Options > Buddy Cards or hack the css if you are so inclined.
Privacy information:
Installation of Buddy Cards includes a link to a Privacy Information page with the following required information.
This Blog has installed a 30 Boxes WordPress Buddy Card Plugin (”Plugin”) from 30 Boxes which enables the use of Buddy Cards. Buddy Cards are small windows that are shown next to comments and contain a subset of either public Buddy Page information available through 30 Boxes, or dynamically created information as a result of an open web search (keyed off a user entered email address). By providing your email address when posting comments to this Blog, you enable the Plugin to poll the 30 Boxes website to find a database match and display information from your 30 Boxes public Buddy Page. If no match is found at the 30 Boxes website, the Plugin will turn to the open web and find publicly available information related to your email address, and this information will be displayed in a Buddy Card. Please refer to the 30 Boxes Privacy Policy for more information.
» View Blog Timeline
Share this post:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.  digg digg    del.icio.us del.icio.us  
. .