

Portable contact lists and the case against XFN - bootload
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2008/03/11/portable-contact-lists-and-the-case-against-xfn/

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iamwil
Boils down to, of the 18 XFN relationships, only rel-contact and rel-me is
being used. For those of you that never heard of XFN,
<http://gmpg.org/xfn/intro>, <http://gmpg.org/xfn/11>

I'm not sure I entirely agree. On one hand, I agree with author that that at
this stage, XFN needs to stick to simple, and just have rel-contact and rel-me
will work for quite some time, as it gets adopted. However, on the other, I've
always found social networks' descriptions of my relationships to people
wanting, because it isn't binary. I don't want all my friends on facebook to
see everything I do. Even with limited profiles, I resort to rejecting
acquaintances.

Rather than specific roles in the XFN relationships, like rel-sweetheart, or
rel-colleague, it might be easier to specify a degree of intimacy rather than
the actual role, because unless you're building a genelogy tree through XFN, I
would venture to guess that when an application imports a contact list, it
mainly cares who they are, and how intimate you are with them so it can set
privacy measures correctly.

