Marc's Voice

XFN and FOAF triumphant!

When I first met Dan Brickley and the various folks from the FOAF community - my life was immediately changed.  The notion of a format that held (what we now call) a social graph - was exactly what I was looking for. I didn’t care about triples, or all the other stuff FOAF was attempting to solve, but we DID need a way fo storing, exchanging and inter-mixing one’s friends - and FOAF was it.

I had just met Jonathan Abrams at a party (danah boyd was there too) and he was bragging about how he’d “exploit’ and “monetize” all the people he had captured inside of Friendster.

First I tried to convince him how wrong he was, but eventually when I realized he was a true asshole - I just told him “dude - I’m gonna dedicate myself to your demise” - and sure enough the Fakesters scandal happened soon after.  Event though Friendster’s rise and VC funding was ahead of it, those of uw who understood how onerous the Fakesters expulsions fortold - knew that Friendster was toast.

I first met Matt Mullenweg when I called him up to evangelise FOAF to him.  But instead - all he wanted to talk about was XFN.  It was the first time I had heard about microformats - and the doubles versus triples battles that we about to erupt.  I tried to stay out of that debate - and XFN continued to grow as did other forms of microformats.

Now we have an important milestone in the evolution of this world.

Brad Fitzpatrick and Google have announced that they’re spidering the web for any XFN and FOAF tags and files and making them all available via an API they call the Social Graph API.

No - it’s not Brad’s fully visionized Open Social Graph - but it’s pretty coolio on it’s own.  These APIs give social media and social networking apps and services the ability to immediately give a new member their list of friends they’ve alreadfy declared.

Now of course - that user needs to have declared something, somewhere via FOAF or XFN - but it’s a first step.  Tribe.net has had all it’s members profile and list of friends in FOAF form - since 2005.  Lots of applications use XFN.  That’s what open standards are all about.

So now we’re all looking to see what the Social Graph APIs have to do with OpenSocial APIs (if any) and what happens NEXT in the evolution of this world.

I for one - am excited as hell!

And thanks to Brad!  He’s got a great post called “URLs are people - too!” and a great introductory geek video to the APIs.