We actually started discussing what we were calling XBN back last
summer when we started Citizen Agency because of our own selfish
needs. ;)

LinkedIN is a good place to start thinking as well as applications
like Salesforce and Zoho and Omni. All of these are great business
applications that have very social elements.

We were thinking along the lines of:

Vendor (instead of service provider or consultant - kind of an
industry standard term for service or goods provider)
Client
Employee (denotes a hierarchy beyond coworker, for payroll)
Partner (external business partner)

with an optional:

Lead (changes to client when RFP is won, stays a lead indefinitely if
lost to maintain a contact)
Employer (for the employee to point back to a company to create a
validated bond, but could just be a one-way validation?)

But hadn't had much of a chance to work on it since we got really busy.

Tara



On 1/25/07, Steve Ganz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Thursday, January 25, 2007 5:53 PM Chris Messina wrote:

> Take a look at XBN -- we brought up this idea awhile back on
> Tara's urging...
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2qa5pc
>
> There's also more there generally about the idea of "professional"
> relationships. I favor a moderate advancement of professional
> relationships, especially in the context of hResume...

> Let's see if we can advance the topic this time around.

Thanks for re-posting this, Chris. I don't know how I missed it the first
time around. About a year ago, when I was playing with hResume for the first
time[1], I found the need to extend on XFN and came up with space seperated
values like: rel="employer former", rel="employer current".

Now that I'm working at LinkedIn, I can see the need for other definitions.
For a real-world example, LinkedIn defines the following relationships (this
is taken directly from what we present to the user for LinkedIn
recommendations):

#  Colleague: You've worked with Joe at the same company
  - You managed Joe directly
  - You reported directly to Joe
  - You were senior to Joe, but did not manage directly
  - Abdul was senior to you, but you did not report directly
  - You worked with Joe in the same group
  - You worked with Joe in different groups

#  Service Provider: You've hired Joe to provide a service for you or your
company

#  Business Partner: You've worked with Joe, but not as a client or
colleague
  - You worked with Joe but were at different companies
  - Joe was a client of yours

Obviously, what LinkedIn calls a Colleague in the description above
translates to "co-worker" in XFN and what we call a Business Partner
translates to "colleague" in XFN. Right now, we currently use XFN to markup
a user's contacts as rel="contact". We want to expand XFN usage in the near
term so that a contact at the same company is marked up as a
rel="co-worker". But it would be great to have some additional values to
work with.

Beyond the professional relationships, a relationship that we define at
LinkedIn is that of "classmate". I see this in use at a number of social
networks. I think rel="classmate" with variations of "former" and "current"
would be very useful.

- Steve

[1] http://steve.ganz.name/blog/2006/01/hresume.html

_______________________________________________
microformats-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss




--
Sincerely,

Tara
-----------------------
tara 'miss rogue' hunt
agent provocateur
Citizen Agency (www.citizenagency.com)
blog: www.horsepigcow.com
phone: 415-694-1951
fax: 415-727-5335
_______________________________________________
microformats-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss

Reply via email to