XFN: the relationships Microformat
August 31st, 2007
My inner geek rejoices with the fact that Microformats have finally got a little more buzz lately! One particular Microformat I’ve been using is XFN (Xhtml Friends Network), aka the Relationships Microformats. This particular Microformat allows me to easily state the sort of relation I have with other people and for instance the blogs I link to.
Yesterday I was discussing with a colleague about whether she should or shouldn’t use them on her upcoming service and although to me the question had a dead simple question, convincing her and others wasn’t as simple as I expected!
People expect us to always have some sort of golden rules, some well defined goals or at least some clear advantages for spending development time/effort in implementing something we’re suggesting. I confess in this case we don’t have them, for for the sake of innovation I really recommend on jump into the unknown sometimes, just for the fun of it.
From our conversation I managed to sort out some key ideas on why we should all start using XFN on every service that can use it:
- CONTACTS AREN’T ALL BORN EQUAL!
As a user I clear understand that some people are more important to me than others, accept it, it seems to me and although I don’t call everyone friend, I call them all contacts, some of the are actually my friends and family, so some type of differentiation is necessary! - EARLY IS AN ADVANTAGE!
If you think that you might use Microformats like XFN on your service, start using them from day 1! That’s the only way to ensure that you start collecting that extra information from the very begging and your users will start using them on every relation that they define on your service.
This is actually a key factor, all social networks start with high rate of new profiles creation and with them a lot of social relations are created too, having XFN introduce later in this process means that your users will have to endure in a redefine process for every relation they already had on the system, and to me, quite few of your users will actually do it, leaving you with in a mix state of information, some of they have XFN info other don’t. - LESS ISN’T ALWAYS GOOD!
That’s the case with information, traditionally the more information you have, the better! With XFN in particular, the managers of that information will have a better understanding of the types of relationships that are sprouting on their services, allowing them to gather a clear typification of their user base, their interests and the type of relations they’re creating on the service: Who are they inviting, friends? Colleagues? Family? With little effort, this extra information, allow to envision new features where you should really invest some development time in!
To me is relatively simple, even if at the very beginning this extra information is pretty much useless, I really believe that sooner rather than later we’ll all greet ourselves by having it rather than not. As in so many other situations, when we collect information that by itself doesn’t represent or add any value, in the end we always seem to come up with new and interesting ways of using it. - GROUPS LACK CONVENTION!
One of the reasons presented during the conversation for not using XFN was that from the User point of view you could get the same experience by allowing them to create and use different user groups.
Well thats just WRONG!
Sure, groups allow you to separate your friends, but if you allow your users to create user-defined groups, you have no way of actually knowing what type of people he/she is collecting in a particular group. By sticking with the XFN closed attributes you know that the users that used them, although randomly they’ll use it in the same sense and situation!
Those were the main results from our quick conversation! Now that I’ve written them, they seem pretty common sense, but they really weren’t when we started.
We surely missed some other reasons for using XFN, does anyone has other “motivation” factors for using them?
Entry Filed under: Blogs, Identity, Microformats, Social Apps, Visualization, Web
Tags: xfn, microformat, semantic, friends, socialapps
1 Comment Add your own
1. André Luís | September 4th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
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.
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