I love the picture on Oberkirch’s site of Tantek jamming on portable social networks. I can just picture the problem being cracked on all Will Hunting style – complex XOXO lists being greased up on whiteboards, chalked up on blackboards, penned out on napkins – nerds getting excited about breakthrough stuff. “We’re tearing down the walls over here! Woo! Hey Facebook, you like apples? How you like them apples?!?”
Alright, let’s slow this down. If you made it past the Good Will Hunting reference but I lost you at XOXO, that’s okay. A fraction of the online population knows what microformats are. Fewer still know what to do with them.
And those of you who did swim alongside the microformats reference are probably getting ready to hit me in the comments with “Why not just use hCard + XFN to mark up friends lists? There’s an FAQ and everything.”
I like the idea of simple fixes. hCard + XFN is one such example. For my non-microformats people, hCard is a simple format that allows you to structure contact data with machine-readable tags in standard xhtml. XFN is even simpler way to represent your relationship to each contact using the rel attribute inside anchors. Easy stuff.
Luckily, it’s only the nerds that are having the problems maintaining 30+ profiles / porting friends right now. Because the nerds know microformats, and we’re beginning to see more and more networks supporting the ideas above.
Personally, I don’t think that’s enough. I’m a huge fan of microformats, but I’m a realist. Browsers will have to fully support them before they do much good for most.
I’m also a huge fan of opml, especially if it’s of the hosted flavor. I’d love to see a similar, standard xml spec for contacts that you could host [and point to inside your OpenID account] and then allow social networks to subscribe to. But that’s still geeky.
Here’s what I see going down. My heros behind microformats are going to keep working on recommendations. The cool networks are going to pick them up and mark up friends lists. (The geeks will know what to do with that.) And just as the networks figure out how to allow you to import your contacts, Microsoft will swoop in, plug in a friends organizer inside the Internet Explorer nut, and proceed to take over the social networking world. I saw it happen in a dream – it must be true.
In the meantime, I’ll mark up friends lists [on networks we're working on] if you do.