It’s been two years since we threw the switch and launched microformats.org. In year two the community has accomplished some incredible results. So many that I can’t hope to list them all. You’ll just have to check the wiki changes for yourself ;) Here are five (mostly quite recent) items of note from the past year:
The Operator Firefox Extension by Michael Kaply. If you haven’t already, download and install Operator into your Firefox browser ASAP. If you don’t have Firefox, go get it. Operator, simply put, is perhaps one of the (if not the) best ways to view, study, use, and test the microformats that you find on numerous sites and author yourself.
“Microformats” book published. The first full book on Microformats, written by microformats community member John Allsopp, was published and extremely well received.
Hundreds of millions published. According to Ben West of Alexa over 450 million microformatted pieces of information have been published on the Web. Caveat: that does include mostly rel-help, which itself is in HTML4.01 so it’s not really a microformat. Thus we round down to the imprecise “hundreds of millions”.
First hCard profile import implemented! Mere days ago, Satisfaction Inc. implemented a really nice user interface for signing up (screenshot) that lets you pick your existing hCard-supporting profile on sites like Cork’d, Last FM, Flickr, Technorati, Twitter, Yedda etc. to fill out such basics as your name, your user icon, and URL.
First XFN+hCard social network import implemented! Mere hours ago, maybe a day ago, Dopplr.com, a currently invite-only travelplan sharing site, implemented the ability to import your contacts from any other site that publishes your contact list with hCard for the people and XFN for your relationship(s) to them, instead of having to manually find and re-add everyone to yet another site. Here is a screenshot of the results.
Well done everyone!
I’m truly looking forward to seeing what we get done in year number three.
See also: Chris Casciano’s post: Microformats Hit 2, Entering Maturity.