As I'm sure many of you have seen on various online services, there's been a lot of recent discussion of "social network portability".
Background I first either coined the phrase "social network portability" or collected it from some other source I saw online this past November* and brainstormed a general problem statement on the "user-interface" page. http://microformats.org/wiki?title=user-interface&diff=10524&oldid=10523 Plaxo actually issued a press release announcing their support for microformats and an "open social web" last month: http://www.plaxo.com/about/releases/release-20070718 days later: a last minute meetup organized between myself, Brian Oberkirch, Eran Globen, and Daniel Burka (as a result of a chance meeting between Brian and myself at the Satisfaction launch party, appropriately enough) http://pownce.com/t/notes/355501/ <http://microformats.org/wiki/events/2007-07-28-portable-social-networks-mee tup> we simplified and crystalized a problem statement (with progressive problems to solve), and I moved the existing work that had been done, and all our new brainstorms and thoughts and solutions to a separate page: http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability This past weekend at BarCampBlock the topics of microformats and social network portability came up several times as you can see by the events I recorded: http://microformats.org/wiki/events Anyone else who attended those events is invited to please add themselves to the "attending" section(s) and collect any notes/links etc. that they have. e.g. <http://microformats.org/wiki/events/2007-08-19-social-network-portability-t oday> Where we are TODAY While there are numerous blog posts and big ideas floating around about how to solve all social network portability problems eventually at some point in the FUTURE, the microformats community has both *solved* and *implemented* both building blocks for, and several user scenarios for social network portability TODAY, as noted in our 2nd anniversary blog post: http://microformats.org/blog/2007/06/21/microformatsorg-turns-2/ And the pages documenting the growing services that support social network portability using microformats today: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-supporting-user-profiles http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-xfn-supporting-friends-lists What next Connect your site to the open social web. If you work on a site that has user profiles, please follow the design patterns and recipes: <http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability#Design_Patterns_and _Recipes> In particular, if your site has profile pages for people, add hCard support, and let new members create profiles by reusing the hCard user profiles on other pages as Satisfaction has, and better yet, by subscribing to. If your site has a notion of "friends" among users, support XFN on friend links between user profile pages, and support adding/removing friends semi-automatically by reusing the hCard+XFN social network on other pages, as Dopplr has. Please provide feedback, issues, questions, etc. on the issues page: http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability-issues Thanks, Tantek _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
