Headup

The wildcard friend request conundrum

Facebook friend requests come in all shapes and sizes, anything from a flirtatious “Hey Gorgeous” to a blast from your kindergarten past. As online friendship becomes more socially acceptable, so do friend requests from people you’ve never met or even heard of. Wildcard Facebook friend requests represent a social conundrum and raise a prickly issue: Is there a polite way to ask someone:
“Excuse me but WHO THE !@#$ ARE YOU?”

Who the !@#$ are you Takeru Kobayashi?!?

I’m personally facing this very issue with the aforementioned Mr. Takeru Kobayashi, who has requested my Facebook friendship and whom, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never met or heard of before. Fortunately for me Headup can assist me to avoid this potential netiquette disaster.

Headup – more omniscient* than Deep Thought, cooler than HAL

Headup’s unique ability to identify people and collect their profiles from a range of social services makes it an ideal tool for snooping out friendship candidates, flirtatious paramours, and self proclaimed potty pals, prior to approving them as your Facebook friends.

Stalking, snooping and spying – the Headup way

Headup will often be able to show you some photos of the flirt along with some of your common friends, tell you a bit about what your former kindergarten confederate is up to, and reveal that Takeru Kobayashi, AKA “The Tsunami”, is an illustrious member of the most prestigious of clubs: former winners of Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Competition.

Armed with this smorgasbord of information I can now make an informed choice on whether to welcome Takeru into my circle of friends, or leave him out in the cold and watch the videos Headup provides of his hotdog eating antics instead.

Takeru "The Tsunami" Kobayashi doing his thing

This ability to check out potential friends beforehand makes Headup a powerful boost to your Facebook activities, enabling you to filter out identity thieves, serial ‘befrienders‘ and other social hazards.

How you can get this:

If you don’t have it yet, download the Headup plug-in for Firefox and follow the instructions, make sure you connect the addon to your Facebook account (at least).

If you already have Headup, make sure you’re logged into your Facebook account and click the little Headup icon on your browser’s status bar (bottom right hand corner of the window).

Headup settings - bottom right of your browser

This will bring you to the personalization screen

Connect Headup to your Facebook account

Make sure that when you’re popped over to the Facebook authorization window you agree to give access to Headup.

Click the Finish button.

Finish connecting Headup to your services to save your settings

That’s it, you’re done!

Next time you visit Facebook peoples’ names will be underlined with Headup’s signature orange dashed line and hovering over them will prompt Headup to provide you with whatever details it is able to retrieve for them.

Let me know if you come up with something juicier than a hotdog…

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*  Thought about this after writing the post:
By definition it’s impossible to be “more omniscient”

Last night our trusty development team released the new version of Headup with a feature I’ve been waiting for from the moment I came on board here:

Headup on Twitter

So here’s the news in a nutshell:

The new Headup identifies Twitter users, making it point’n'click simple to discover a wealth of info about your twitter friends.

Here’s what I got for @scobleizer (aka Mr. Robert Scoble):

This is the summary view of the data Headup was able to discover about Robert Scoble - note the information is personalized and reflects my social circle

How did I make this work?

Step 1 – Get Headup
To get access to all this semantically discovered content you first need to have Headup installed on your machine. Go to http://Headup.com and click the big “Get Headup” button. Headup will install pretty much like any other Firefox addon.

Step 2 – Personalize Headup for Twitter
If you haven’t already done so in the installation process your next step is personalizing Headup and connecting it to your Twitter account.

Click the yellow headup icon in the lower right corner of your browser and select “Settings”:

The Headup Menu - On your status bar

Headup will display the “Personalize Headup” panel:

Personalize Headup

Click the Twitter icon and enter the details for your Twitter account. No need to worry about your privacy – Headup has no record of your details and all your information is stored only on your local computer.

Connect Headup to your Twitter account

When you’re done connecting Headup to your services click the “Thank’s, I’m done” button.

I'm done personalizing!

Step 3 – Check it out on Twitter

That’s it, You’re good to go!

Visit Twitter and check out the Headup underlines that now appear under peoples’ user-names. To access Headup discoveries for a Twitter user hover over their underlined name and click the Headup icon that appears above it:

Click the Headup icon that appears when you hover over underlined names

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