While I've resisted the temptation so far, it does seem that, in order to build a relevant and useful cross-social networking tool -- I need a way to use email addresses as well as URLs to identify people. In particular, you'll notice that most social networks currently (and unfortunately) ask you to login to your webmail accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) to discover whether your contacts are already on the site and if not, to invite them via email. Clearly without a widespread way to message people via their URLs, this is the only reliable method to invite people to join whatever the latest social network is.
I'm not here to critique the behavior but instead to recognize what the market currently accepts and treats as acceptable. I created a simple XFN aggregating application, it occurs to me that adding email addresses, both for the purpose of rel-me links and for contact links is actually useful and something that should be supported in XFN (it's currently not clear whether this is acceptable or not; I'm making the case that it should be). Therefore, this: <a href="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]" rel="contact">Buddy</a> should be as acceptable as this: <a href="http://foo.com/buddy"; rel="contact">Buddy</a> And, on http://foo.com/buddy, this should be permissible: <a href="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]" rel="me">Buddy</a> Clearly the biggest issue I see with this scheme is the inability to link out *from* the email address. However, I'm not sure that this case nullifies the utility of such links. Thoughts are welcome. Chris -- Chris Messina Citizen Provocateur & Open Source Advocate-at-Large Work: http://citizenagency.com Blog: http://factoryjoe.com/blog Cell: 412 225-1051 Skype: factoryjoe This email is: [ ] bloggable [X] ask first [ ] private _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
