I have finally found my dream application - Tabber. It’s rough around the edges. It lacks the usability that Spokeo has for reading your friends posts. You add your feeds/sites and it will auto-discover your friends. It builds a list creating your lifestream and attaches you to a list of your friends lifestreams.

This seems to all be accomplished by using a combination of the hCard microformat and RSS feeds. I admit it isn’t perfect. For instance I have someone I am linked to on Twitter and also linked to in del.icio.us, but since they have different screen names they show as two contacts. Perhaps they have a way of telling them apart if the hCard contained more information.

The big thing that I see lacking, besides the desperate need of a graphic designer, is the inclusion and utilization of FOAF information. Once I put in my FOAF info it could grab my friends info and possibly de-dupe.

Despite the minor roughness, this is the ideal social application and a fantastic use of microformats. I can’t believe Google hasn’t snatched this up to integrate into Blogger or Yahoo! to integrate into Y360 (did they abandon this?)

I have been following the Social Network Portability(SNP) group setup at Google. The conversation there has been lively and dynamic at times. But the conversation always seems to boil down to the need for a centralized approach to managing friends. I just don’t see where that is much different than using Facebook. And why is it everyone is always trying to reinvent the wheel? Create their own “unique” protocol or data format.

Henry Story from Sun Microsystems chimed in yesterday with a fantastically detailed dialog on the whole social graph or SNP problem. What I found really interesting about the whole post is that he never attempts to develop a new standard, format, or protocol.

Henry dives right into the elephant in the room, security. Stating the obvious: “Not everyone lives in the open the same way” He is the first one to make me understand the beauty of the mbox_sha1sum. Then he goes on to give an example of providing different foaf’s based on the amount of trust you assign to each person.

This was a fantastic read and I highly recommend it.

Trying to find that one ring to rule them all seems to run counter to the whole reason this conversation is happening. It’s time to turn the conversation to a truly open system, much in the way DNS or even OpenID is.

Well that is what Dare Obasanjo thinks anyway. I think we can forgive this short sighted thinking because it’s systemic in the culture of his employer. (ouch! Shameless Microsoft dig. I promise not to do it again.)

Yes. He is absolutely correct that an API is better. And to be fair, he does point out that that microformats are a good fit in situations where the client must parse the entire HTML page anyway. To see samples of good ideas in this situation check out this slide show.

I don’t see microformats replacing RSS/Atom feeds. But I can see where microformats will strengthen a conversation. When I get a trackback, my blog could automatically fetch the pages and assemble a page of notes on the post. The software could assemble a pseudo bibliography from the trackback I received and follow the chain down. Making it easy for me to follow the conversation and how it got to this point. Now replying is simple. I didn’t have to track it all down. I let the computer do the work.

That is just one idea that I thought off the top of my head. I am sure smarter people than I have even better ideas.

I don’t think Dare Obasanjo really meant it when he said microformats are a stupid idea. It was a tongue in cheek statement. I think he brings up some good points to ponder while furthering the conversation. Frankly, I am glad the conversation is playing out at all.

The blogoshpere has been has been buzzing with talk of Microformats, FOAF, XFN and various other formats and would be formats in response to the Brad Fitzpatrick post about the Social Graph. So if you need a good place to start I ran across a site that has assembled some very well put together tutorials on Microformats.

In tech years it seems like eons ago, but in 2003 Google purchased Pyra Labs aka blogger. Pyra Labs made an innocuous software application that made bloggin easy for the masses. Much to everyones amazement, Google has done relatively little with the software since.

Fast forward to 2007, social networks are the craze. The are popping up so rapidly no one can keep up with them all. They started out as the shiny diamond in the palm of the internet. Now the cracks are starting to form and the luster is beginning to dull. What is the problem? They all seem to forget that the social part of a social network is center on people.

This is where Google missed the boat and could be Yahoo!’s golden ticket. Google has software that is focused on the person called blogger. In general a blog is the center of ones digital life. This blog takes many forms, but its basically like a house. It’s were a person resides. Facebook or MySpace is where you go for an extended vacation, but once it’s over you want to return home. Google never advanced the blog to make it an inviting place to return.

Yahoo!, who is looking for a way to get ahead of the pack, has done so well at being a sticky site that it could build a package like I am about to describe. Using it’s huge user base to turn people away from the stove pipe social networks and embrace an open, user centered social product.

Imagine a blogging application that embraced microformats like hAtom and hCard. Sprinkle in XFN support and OpenID. Standardize trackbacks and open up comments so that I can add your comments to my conversation and exchange them back to you with a reference to my post.

No that we are pretending that a blog package like this exists lets push things a little further. So say I have photo’s and I want to share them. Let’s use Flickr as an example. So I use my OpenID to sign up to flickr, which in return provides back the detail of my blog url. Flickr checks my blog url and finds that I have a friends list in hCard format with xfn data. It pulls in all those friends and says, hey, I know some of these people. Would you like me to notify them that you are sharing photo’s? And about these individuals that I don’t know, would you like me to send them an invite to connect to your sharing feed.

By the way, did I mention that a person could just subscribe directly to a lifestream feed provided as part of my blogging service?

So know you are zipping through a results set from a search you did to find information on individuals blogging about cool blogging ideas and you found a blog you find interesting and want to add this person as a friend. A little bookmarklet titled “Add to Friends list” is nestled nicely in your browser so you add them to your friends list on your blog. Behind the scenes this is taken care of by your blogging software that pulls this persons hCard from their site.

This scenario provides ample opportunity for value added services like Flickr and YouTube, etc. but renders meaningless the need for a site like MySpace and Facebook or forces them to become more open so they can exchange data.

This post, I hope, builds on ideas from this 2006 blog post and Social Network Portability page on the microformats wiki.

I bounce around the web a lot searching out new information. Yesterday I stumbled across a video presentation given by Kevin Marks and Mary Hodder on Microformats. This in turn inspired me to stop being lazy and fix my blog to support the hAtom format.

I use Wordpress as my blog software. This makes it really easy to change the templates. I spent about 15 minutes skimming the hAtom standard. Using the examples as a guide it took about 20 minutes to convert over the posts. I jumped over to a site called the Almost Universal Mocroformat Parser to verify that my blog could be read as an hAtom feed. Everything looked good.

So in less than an hour I was able to convert over the main site page. Maybe if I get ambitious I will convert the archives and single post pages too. Who knows. It could happen.