
Consolidate and take back your social network with XFN, openID and microformats - danw
http://fourstarters.com/2007/06/20/the-future-of-everything-is-social-consolidate-and-take-back-your-social-network/
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Alex3917
And in fact the first ever social network, FOAF, was pretty much exactly what
he describes. It's basically just a microformat that can be used to describe a
person, and then anyone can make their own client to do what they wish with
that data. And I think there were maybe twelve or so people who ever used it.

And then Mark Zuckerberg came along and said, "Hey, if I take this microformat
thing and turn it into a unified experience, this social networking thing
might actually take off."

~~~
bootload
_'... , FOAF, was pretty much exactly what he describes. ...'_

This is one area I've been looking at carefully ever since I created a flickr
account and had a b@gger of a time trying to find, add friends from flickr.
But one thing I found trying FOAF ( <http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/> ) was some
of the assumptions. Email for instance. Going through quite a few friends I
noticed they all removed 'specific' email accounts replacing them with either
web forms or generic accounts.

Aside from this the spec is pretty good & has been around since Y2K. As for
most social network sites (roach motels) it is not in their interests to allow
leakage. I haven't checked if Fb allows you access to friends (yep, found perl
WWW::Facebook::API::Friends using _facebook.friends.areFriends_ ) ... so while
you can extract information using the API Fb does not markup the client side.

Maybe the approach is to create a FRIEND PROXY SITE that abstracts your social
network above social sites? Something that ...

\- allows you to login

\- allows friends to login

\- add various social sites that you frequent

Transparently ....

\- use api's (where possible) on sites to extract friend data

\- create master list of friends (noting url + relationships etc)

\- updates this list at regular periods

\- pay to export _all_ friends & associated relationships

Simple idea of allowing network of friends to be linked & captured. Now is
there are real demand for this? (I doubt most users frequent more than 2-3
sites.) But if you have to re-enter 5xfriends to 50xfriends & associated
details maybe this is viable.

This is a flaw in the microformat crowd. It assumes the markup exists in each
site. The plus side is it's easy to implement. It only takes Facebook.

~~~
steve
Maybe the approach is to create a FRIEND PROXY SITE that abstracts your social
network above social sites?

Really, that seems to miss the point. If all you want is to know who your
friends are then you wouldn't need any website at all.

~~~
bootload
_"... Really, that seems to miss the point. If all you want is to know who
your friends are then you wouldn't need any website at all ...."_

Have you tried to re-find your _friends_ after moving to another social site?
Thats the problem. It's not having a site of just friends it's about being
able to re-build your social network on new sites at a level above. A means to
independently store, record & modify your own network not relying on the
clumsy & ill-conceived tools that new sites pass for adding existing friends.

You would think that companies would try to improve this. Doing it right could
mean the difference between so-so and good membership sign-ups.

