Rather than being a liability, however, social networks can be used to personalize and tailor information to individual users, and drive the development of new social search algorithms.... Digg can create personalized front pages for every user that are based on his or her friends’ readings. This will finally free individuals from “tyranny of the majority” which results from viewing a common global front page.

We've been doing that since 2001.

Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg

Our recent update went out with a bug that sometimes cropped up when replying to posts which resulted in a 500 server error. This bug has been addressed. Please let us know if you see anything odd with the site.

Reply bug fixed

Image posting has been re-enabled! Post away. We've tested on IE, Firefox, Safari, SideKick and Nintendo Wii, and the feature seems to work on all of these platforms. We still have some bugs we're still tracking with the most recent update, but we should have those cleared up over the course of Sunday...

Image Posting has been re-enabled!

(Update: This is causing problems with IE. Image links have been disabled while we work out the cause of the problem.. Argh..)

This comes with several improvements to the way messages are edited and displayed. In addition to inline display of images using the img tag, we have also added the HTML tags u, center, and pre, in addition to the already existing support for b, i, and a. blockquote can be used as blockquote, bq, or quote. When pre is used, any HTML tags within are escaped, so you can now display snippets of code and other previously impossible text without losing formatting. For instance, here is an example of an image tag:

<img src="http://kradmeme.local/meme_tail.gif" alt="Optional description">

Image tags can be justified left or right using the align attribute so text wraps around them, such as the image in this post. All implemented tags support standard HTML attributes to the degree we support the attributes.

When posting, the interface now displays error messages in realtime about formatting problems above the edit window. Eventually we will have this functionality include better information about to what types of HTML is allowed and how it can be used. In general, the system will display posts better and more uniformly. It is no longer so ridged about spacing after quotes, posts will now display properly regardless of if you have a newline after a quote or not. Characters such as > and < can now be used in posts without being part of an HTML tag as well.

Any Google/YouTube/Revver videos that are primary links will be displayed automatically at the top of the post. Videos can also be displayed inline with a tag like this:

<video url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2f4heaG288" alt="Optional description">

We will add other video services as we become aware of them. Let us know if there is a service you would like us to support.

We would like to single out Acidus for praise. His help made this update happen. We are very excited to have him actively involved with MemeStreams developlment. His work is present in several aspects of this update, such as the on-the-fly picture resizing and the realtime post validity checking. Be sure to tell him how much he kicks ass. We have never worked with anyone better when it comes to web security and javascript.

Be sure to tell terratogen he kicks ass as well. For years now, he has been providing us with with all our graphic design needs. You can see his work in the site's logo and the various graphical icons used throughout the site.

As always, if you encounter any problems, let Rattle or Decius know. More information and site updates are on the way.

Decius just posted a minor update to MemeStreams. There were a number of circles in MemeStreams that were broken. Many did not have names. These have all been deleted. If you did not have any circles before, you now have three: Co-Workers, Friends, and Interesting People, which are the same three that new users now get automatically. If you had circles before, your circles should not have changed. Please let us know if you observe any problems with these changes.

MemeStreams Update - Circle Changes

Decius just pointed out that MemeStreams turned five years old recently, and none of us remembered to say anything about it...

MemeStreams was first openned to the public on December 5th, 2001, so December 5th, 2006 was MemeStreams' 5th birthday. I'm sorry I didn't think of this until now. We're certainly not the media moguls that we thought we'd be when we started this thing, but its kept our attention and interest for a long time mostly because of all of the other people who hang out here who have interesting things to say and contribute. We thank all of you for being a part of it. Here's to another interesting 5 years!

We should have waited two days to go live with the site.. We could have made tasteless jokes about the day living in infamy.

However, according to Wikipedia, we do have some things we can use for bad jokes:

1848 - California Gold Rush: In a message before the U.S. Congress, US President James K. Polk confirms that large amounts of gold had been discovered in California.

1933 - Prohibition ends: Utah becomes the 36th U.S. state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75% of states needed to enact the amendment (this overturned the 18th Amendment which had outlawed alcohol in the United States).

1945 - Flight 19 is lost in the Bermuda Triangle.

Walt Disney was also born..

MemeStreams 5th Birthday

The User Weblogs page has been updated to include pictures and more information. There is a link to hide details that gives the old view of the page.

The session tracking has been updated to only see users and guests as present on the site if they have viewed a page in the last 15 minutes. Online status is noted underneath user pictures if users are online.

Further tweaks to the picture system have been made. Any pictures posted from this point forward will be higher quality. We may go through the existing posted picture and improve their quality as well..

Improvements have been made to searching. The search box on the upper right side of the screen is now contextual. Searches will be preformed on the content you are currently viewing. If you search from a user's blog, the search results will be from that user's blog. If you search in the agent, you will search the current group of users being viewed. Searches can be widened to the entire system at any time by clicking the "Search MemeStreams" button.

More performance tweaks to search are on the way... As are more picture capabilities. Sometime in the next few days, pictures will also start to appear in other pages on the system.

Enjoy!

The Social Network section of the site has been updated. It now only produces graphs and statistics using data from the past month. The stats are more informative and include pictures. The graphs are not pure noise.

The Most Recommended Users page remains not quite as useful

There is still much room for improvement, but that portion of the site is actually useful now.

We have begun pushing out a series of upgrades to MemeStreams. Some new features will be working their way into the site over the next few days.

We are pleased to announce that user profiles have gotten a much needed makeover. Among the changes, is the ability to post pictures.

Currently pictures are only displayed in user profiles and on user blogs. As we start rolling out more features, pictures will appear in more places.

Enjoy!