4 Technologies for Portability in Social Networks: A Primer - ReadWriteWeb

Very interesting article on data portablity. The social networking space will have more of such formats/technologies to interoperate for easier exchange of information as well as use of usage. The formats discussed are

Hcard - Contact related
XFN, FOAF - Friend of a Friend
Google Social Graph related API
OpenID, OpenSocial

I believe that anyone developing social networking applications has to understand these technologies better and try to use the ones that suit their application/service purpose.

I would like to understand more about this in context to the mobile social networking angle..

I will post more when I read more :-)

4 Technologies for Portability in Social Networks: A Primer - ReadWriteWeb: "hCard: Providing Your Contact Information

MicroformatsUsers are tired of repeatedly entering profile information over and over again. This problem is solved by the microformat hCard. Leslie Chicoine, an Experience Designer at Get Satisfaction, talked about how her company had created a sign up process for their web application using hCard. (see screen shot below)

HCardGetSatisfaction
XFN & FOAF: Who are your contacts

SocialGraphAPIAnother microformat, XFN, and the FOAF project are techniques for embedding relationships in links. This allows social networks to recommend contacts that should be shared, without scraping web based email clients. Recently, Google introduced a Social Graph API, which 'index[es] the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections'.

Something very interesting that I wasn't aware of until today's panel was that both Plaxo & Six Apart were working on something similar before Google announced OpenSocial, according to Joe Smarr and David Recordon. However, once Google started focusing on this they were happy to hand it over to them - because Google 'has the web on a hard drive', so it makes the crawling component of this far less difficult. For a good overview on Google's Social Graph API, check out"