Latest news: (2005-03-05 5:06 PM CST) Have you been looking for the lj_connect source? Well, the bad news is,
I still haven't released the web app yet. The good news, however, is that I have released the application logic
as a Perl module called Algorithm::SixDegrees. Contained
therein is a program called "ljc.pl", which implements the basic lj_connect functionality. Enjoy!
(2005-02-03 5:25 PM CST) LJ_Connect now converts dashes to underscores, the same way LiveJournal does.
If you'd like to leave me an LJ comment about this, please do so in
this thread
on my journal. Thank you.
This is a Six Degrees of Separation tool. What happens when you put two names in the boxes
above (or a name in the left and a star (*) in the right) is that the system starts downloading
your friends lists from LiveJournal. It then figures out which LiveJournal users can be used
to make a chain between those names, starting with the person on the left and ending with the
person on the right. If you'd like a more detailed explanation, visit
this LJ post
I made explaining what this does a bit better.
If you put a LJ username in the ignore box (or more than one, if you put a space between them)
it'll let you ignore that user when doing the matching. Limit 20 users being ignored.
It will show you as it goes what LiveJournal users it's looking at, and some basic statistics.
Usernames in green are users that are connected to the name in the
left box. Usernames in orange are users that are connected to the
name at right. A blue number tells you the minimum number of hops
needed to make the connection. A red number tells you the number
of new friends learned about from the group of users being worked on. A bold number
tells you how many users it's looked at to that point, and a italic number
tells you how many users it's checked with LiveJournal for friends information.
It only gets a particular user once per day. It'll only get 2500 new users for each time
that you run this program.
I have written up a fairly detailed explanation of how the code
operates. If you want source, please check out the Perl module
Algorithm::SixDegrees,
which contains a basic lj_connect script sample for your perusal.
If you need to get a hold of me, my LiveJournal username is 
sachmet
and I encourage your feedback. If you get any weird messages, or something
doesn't seem to work right, please let me know. My email address is
sachmet@livejournal.com.
Cut and paste this in your own LiveJournal: