You know XFN — the XHTML Friends Network? The one where you add relationship info into anchor tags, like so:
<a href="http://jeremy.visser.name/" rel="friend met">Jeremy Visser</a>
It’s interesting to wonder what the future of it is. The cool thing about XFN is that it has the capability to be a decentralised social network. Facebook, MySpace, and the like, are centralised social networking sites, where you have to “register” in order to “add/invite friends”, “keep in touch”, etc.
I must confess that I am part of Facebook. In particular, I like the Friend Wheel application, which displays a graphical layout of the connections between your friends, rather like this:
(No, you’re not getting a bigger version.)
Facebook should not be necessary to do that. Though pretty much all XFN is is [sic] some attributes tacked on to a link (like rel="friend met"), it has the same power. A person could write a web service that downloads a web page of your choice (like your own page that has XFN-enabled links to your friends), scans the page for XFN relationships, then scans your friends’ pages for relationships, and displays a friend wheel just like the above.
This is all possible without a central authority like Facebook juggling all the relationships itself. The question is, however, why isn’t it done this way?
I think I know a couple of answers to this myself, but I am interested in some feedback on other peoples’ opinions. Is there a magic bullet we have we can use to promote the use of XFN, and put a nail in the coffin for centralised social networking websites?
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