XFN usage stats and Re: [uf-discuss] rel="muse" implies romantic relationship?

[Tantek Ç elik]

Aside - this entire thread particularly warms my heart - it's been a while
since we've had a serious but light-hearted topic, and clearly the time had
come.

Jason Garber, welcome to the list, and thanks for a much appreciated bit of
levity on a weekend afternoon.


On 12/10/06 4:31 PM, "Tara Hunt" <horsepigcow at gmail.com> wrote:

> Interesting anecdote about this...rel="muse" actually caused a bit of
> a tiff between Chris and I about 6 months back, as he had a bunch of
> women marked up as this...since it was under 'romantic', he agreed to
> change them to 'colleague' and 'friend'.

Given the variety / diversity of relationships (romantic and otherwise) and
the broad spectrum of exclusivity/openness boundaries among people, it's
good to clearly communicate about such matters.

Tara, since you brought up the topic, did you ask him to change the
rel="muse" relationships that Chris had for men as well?

This brings up another question in the usage of XFN.  The public nature.

XFN has always implicitly been designed and used in purely "public" contexts
- e.g. the set of relationships was very much filtered by what was found
publicly in the wild (before we even had the microformats principles), and
what we thought people would feel comfortable expressing publicly.  The
"romantic" relationships certainly engendered the most debate/discussion
among the XFN creators, "crush" and "muse" in particular.

While there are a few sites that have publicly searchable indexes of XFN
relationships, I don't know of any that provide stats on what XFN
relationships are used the most/least (even the Google markup study [1]
doesn't mention XFN values).

For example how many rel="crush" links are there?


> :) So, there you go...it causes riffs in relationships and
> misunderstandings. LOL

I think I have to pass the buck to communication when it comes to
riffs/misunderstandings in relationships.  A public admittance to someone
being someone else's muse just seems like open honesty IMHO.

Thanks,

Tantek

[1] http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html