While I am all for microformats, my biggest concern lies with identity. For instance, who is to stop random people and spammers from falsifying my relationship with them, only to find myself sucked into their other lists or requests for other social network stuff. Not to mention the array of apps that integrate XFN into their apps, where the user has no control.

Just because someone follows me on Twitter, doesn't mean that I reciprocate the response - but twitter will still apply the XFN. XFN, when out of the user's control - becomes a problem.

I am excited, but I can also see the potential misuse, abuse, and frustration.
Nate Klaiber | Homepage | 02.04.08 - 4:15 pm | #

David,

Thanks for a great post. I too am very excited about the potential from Google's recent implementation and all the other great work going on by social network sites implementing XFN, hCard, and other microformats.

Nate,

Regarding some of the concerns you point out. First, XFN rel="me" requires symmetrical links in order to connect two identities. So a random person linking to you and claiming rel="me" should have no effect unless you link back to them with rel="me". As far as random apps go, publishing your XFN on the Web is like publishing anything else on the Web - do it only for information that you are comfortable making public and being indexed by search engines etc.

Modeling and representing the real-world asymmetry of relationships is one of the big advantages of XFN over the old "are you my friend yes or no" required reciprocation model of many social network sites.

When Twitter applies XFN noting that someone else considers you a contact, that's all that is implied - that one way relationship. Your outbound relationships (e.g. who you consider to be a contact) are completely under your control. If you follow them, you consider them to be a contact, if you don't, you don't.

You're right to emphasize user control over the data they publish, and I strongly encourage you to keep it up. If you find any examples where this is not the case, please add them to the XFN Issues wiki page so that we can research them and resolve them.

http://microformats.org/wiki/xfn-issues

Thanks!

Tantek

P.S. If you find any of the above clarifications helpful, I encourage you to add them to the XFN FAQ wiki page:

http://microformats.org/wiki/xfn-faq
Tantek | Homepage | 02.05.08 - 3:47 pm | #

Another Mac OS X Twitter app added to the Twitter Forge..

"Twitteromatic will post the following useless information (from your mac) as a Twitter "tweet" with the push of a button: weather (U.S. only, sorry), secret word of the day, current uptime, Firefox and Safari current URL, lotto numbers, currently playing iTunes track, and "On This Day In History."
Ferienwohnung Sizilien | Homepage | 10.06.08 - 12:50 pm | #