Alcides Fonseca

Brad has announced Google’s Social Graph API. It is indeed cool, but not that amazing. There are a lot of FOAF and XFN parsers around, but being able to poll the web cache they have for google search. This really gets your requests time down to one (the API). Of course, now you don’t get real-time parsing. I really hope Google will work with Technorati’s Kitchen Ping Service but it’s more probable that they launch their own microformat search.

So what’s the feature I miss so much? Contact merger. When I ask for my friends I get this huge list of all my contacts in all my social networks. But I have friends that are in more than one social network, and then being repeated there. It’s possible to merge them, but I would require the maximum of N-1 queries extra from the API. This will really slow it down for friendly people like me. Can’t powerful Google support this in its API?

After the RSS feeds being restored, I took the chance to add some new stuff to my online identity. I use this URL as an endpoint to all my online activity. My hCard information is here, my XFN friend list is here, the links to all my profiles in several online services/social networks are here. It even works as my OpenId.

For the past days, I’ve been checking up on FOAF. There is already one opensource social network accepting this format to import all your information. There is a bit of discussion between XFN+hCard versus FOAF since the two of them represent your personal information and the relationship you have with others. I believe more in the microformat way of displaying data, but FOAF follows RDF standards.While Dan Brickey, one of the authors of FOAF, believes there is space for the both of them, I still have my doubts… Either way, I did my own FOAF file with basic info and then linking to the FOAF files extracted from my last.fm, twitter and flickr profiles. If you want to make yours, you can write by hand or you could use FOAF-O-Matic. For wordpress users, there is already one plugin.

If you are interesting in learning about RDFa (a formal way of defining everything! in semantic web) and a bit about FOAF, make sure you see this simple video.

Next, I decided to implement my own APML file from all the tags I use in my blog. The result is already linked in my head tag and I am waiting to use it in some projects. Imagine filtering through your feeds based on what you post (that is probably what you like!). Yes, there is also a wordpress plugin for this too. And then I just adapted the code to serve as a tag cloud in the sidebar. But the evening hacking wasn’t finished until I add the last delicious entry for each tag page.

I hope in less than 6 months I have a daily usage of this stuff I’m working on. It would be a shame if when I register in a website it doesn’t import all my public info :(

Ever wanted to host your own Facebook or Hi5? Have the benefits of a social network, but without outsourcing it to 3rd parties like Crowdvine or Ning?

I’ve already posted on creating your own social network and mentioned Elgg, an OpenSource SocialNetwork that includes features such as:

• Blogging
• File repositories
• Podcast and full RSS support
• Tagging
• Profiling
• Communities
• Multilingual

And two that caught my attention:

• OpenID support
• Importing content

OpenID is a obvious advantage comparing to hi5, Facebook or even other social networks. It allows you to have your own Identity shared by all your social networks (if you want). But what about importing content? I really thought they were thinking XFN, hCards and other microformats, but no. They are using another standard: FOAF. The Friend of a Friend standard is a XML-RDF way of expressing connections between people and information about them. And it’s even compatible with OpenID.

But personally I believe more in the hCard+XFN solution. It allows you to have your data encapsulated in your content, and not a separated XML file. You write the code once, and it’s readable by both people and machines. I guess those two tribes should gather and pick on a real solution. It’s been so hard for people to start adopting this kind of standards that if there are two to choose from, we will never have that decentralized social network we all dream of.