Comments on: XFN: the relationships Microformat http://blog.centopeia.com/2007/08/31/xfn-the-relationships-microformat/ Ramblings about digital life Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:17:34 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6 By: André Luís http://blog.centopeia.com/2007/08/31/xfn-the-relationships-microformat/#comment-21002 André Luís Tue, 04 Sep 2007 21:26:45 +0000 http://blog.centopeia.com/2007/08/31/xfn-the-relationships-microformat/#comment-21002 Oh definitely. When I was designing my old blog layout, I decided to go down the path of XFN, not just for the sake experimenting but also because I wanted to do just that… differentiate my connections. My mistake at the time was that I lifted the bar too much, providing too much info for each of my contacts and I ended up with a too-hard-to-update list, which defeated the whole purpose. But now, 2 years later, microformats have earned a much bigger status. And not only XFN, if you’re building a social network, you should definitely look into XFN and also hCards. Maybe even xFolk. (the more the merrier) Some of the most innovative networks have been using this to migrate data. We, as users, should be able to jump to another service and not have to invite everyone again… that’s what’s keeping so many of us tied with twitter and resisting pownce… or tied up with hi5 and not be able to switch to any other. (in a utopical world, there would be a social network that allowed you to connect with URLs, not simply members of the same community. Imagine, me member of network X connecting to people from my network but also with Hi5, MySpace, etc.) If YOU support hCards and XFN right from the start, you can ask your users to build such a meaningful network(semantic web, in practice), that not only will outsiders understand quite well how you relate to your friends or what kind of friends are you connecting to in these networks, but also they’ll be able to switch later… if they so wish. Remember, we shouldn’t be afraid to let our users free… if we have a good enough product, they’ll stay… but don’t make it hard on them to leave. Remember that you can use this to your advantage… importing these details from somewhere on the web. If you do, there won’t be as much friction as there will be if you don’t. The beauty of it, is that you don’t even have to know which network they’re coming from… just that they support xfn or hcard. Unfortunately, rubhub has closed down… it used to allow you to search relationships. If you new someone and wanted to know if you had some connections in common you could list every one of their relationships… with every detail stated.. “met, colleague”, etc. Too bad it closed down… it will be sorely missed. Cheers for pushing the usage of XFN, Pedro… I’ll try to do my part around here as well. Oh definitely. When I was designing my old blog layout, I decided to go down the path of XFN, not just for the sake experimenting but also because I wanted to do just that… differentiate my connections.

My mistake at the time was that I lifted the bar too much, providing too much info for each of my contacts and I ended up with a too-hard-to-update list, which defeated the whole purpose.

But now, 2 years later, microformats have earned a much bigger status. And not only XFN, if you’re building a social network, you should definitely look into XFN and also hCards. Maybe even xFolk. (the more the merrier)

Some of the most innovative networks have been using this to migrate data. We, as users, should be able to jump to another service and not have to invite everyone again… that’s what’s keeping so many of us tied with twitter and resisting pownce… or tied up with hi5 and not be able to switch to any other.
(in a utopical world, there would be a social network that allowed you to connect with URLs, not simply members of the same community. Imagine, me member of network X connecting to people from my network but also with Hi5, MySpace, etc.)

If YOU support hCards and XFN right from the start, you can ask your users to build such a meaningful network(semantic web, in practice), that not only will outsiders understand quite well how you relate to your friends or what kind of friends are you connecting to in these networks, but also they’ll be able to switch later… if they so wish.

Remember, we shouldn’t be afraid to let our users free… if we have a good enough product, they’ll stay… but don’t make it hard on them to leave. Remember that you can use this to your advantage… importing these details from somewhere on the web. If you do, there won’t be as much friction as there will be if you don’t. The beauty of it, is that you don’t even have to know which network they’re coming from… just that they support xfn or hcard.

Unfortunately, rubhub has closed down… it used to allow you to search relationships. If you new someone and wanted to know if you had some connections in common you could list every one of their relationships… with every detail stated.. “met, colleague”, etc.

Too bad it closed down… it will be sorely missed.

Cheers for pushing the usage of XFN, Pedro… I’ll try to do my part around here as well.

]]>