Creating portable social networks with microformats

Data portability is a hot topic right now. Contact details lie at the fiery heart of the discussion. Why is it that every new social network site requires that I re-enter all my contact details? I have already published this information. Why must I re-establish connections with other people? I have already made these connections elsewhere.

I have a number of profile pages:

• twitter.com/adactio
• corkd.com/people/adactio
• pownce.com/adactio/
• last.fm/user/adactio/

Notice the emerging pattern in the URL structure? There is also a pattern under the hood, one that is more formalised. That pattern is hCard, the microformat for contact details. My profile information is marked up in a human- and machine-readable way. This information can now be extracted using tools like Operator, a plug-in for Firefox. The profile URL is also an end-point for RESTful interactions.

My friends lists are also available to humans and machines at RESTful end-points:

• twitter.com/adactio/friends
• corkd.com/people/adactio/buddies
• pownce.com/adactio/friends/
• last.fm/user/adactio/friends/

These people are marked up with hCard. They are also marked up with XFN, a microformat that uses the rel attribute to define relationships between people. For lists that span more than one page, a couple of other values in a rel attribute (“prev” and “next”) can be used to link the pages together. Perhaps the most powerful value is rel=”me” which, when used reciprocally, allows me to verify that multiple profile URLs refer to the same person.

This ecosystem of contact details and relationships makes my social network more portable. For example, Satisfaction allows me to sign up by subscribing to an hCard by simply entering a URL. Dopplr allows me to enter the URL of any friends list marked up with hCard.

My using microformats to mark up already-published data with more semantic fidelity, users of social network sites have more control over the flow of their data. This way of transfering contact details is far more preferable to asking users to enter their usernames and passwords for third-party sites (e.g. GMail, Yahoo Mail). Teaching users how to be phished is just plain wrong (from a technical and moral perspective).

The tools for creating portable social networks exist today. This presentation will briefly outline the philosophy behind microformats, demonstrate the benefits of hCard and XFN, and show how easy they are to publish. The presentation is aimed at publishers but will also include examples for anyone interested in parsing microformatted documents.