[uf-discuss] Marking Up Personal Profiles

[Stephen Paul Weber]

Sounds like hCard... possibly with a few new fields.

On 9/30/06, Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au> wrote:
> Hi,
>    Recently, I've been thinking about the many sites dedicated to
> publishing personal profiles to help you meet others for friendship,
> romance or even intimate encounters, and the many problems associated
> with them; particularly with the way in which they hold onto the data,
> rather than sharing it with the world.
>
> Such sites include RSVP, LavaLife, AdultMatchMaker and dozens of others.
>   The way they generally work is that you are required to sign up for
> the service, enter your profile information and then people can find you
> by searching that same site.  If you want to be found through more than
> one such service, you have to sign up for each individually.
>
> There are several problems with this:
> * Service providers usually require you to pay before you can contact
> someone you've found or vice versa.
> * They often restrict the amount of contact information you can show
> publicly (see previous point).
> * Signing up for one service only allows you to be found by searches
> through them (or their affiliates).
> * Signing up for multiple services is time consuming to re-enter all the
> same data and more so if you need to update it.
>
> Anyway, I was thinking, wouldn't it be cool if you could publish your
> profile anywhere you like, whether it be your own personal site or some
> service provider, and your data could be found and searched by any
> search engine.  There are already similar types of search engines for
> searching blogs, sites with heviews, hResumes, etc.  So I'm sure it
> could work for this too.
>
> In fact, hResume is a similar concept, except that it's designed for
> publishing professional information about yourself, whereas this is
> about more personalised information.
>
> The kind of information typically collected by these sites includes the
> following (some of which can already be handled by existing microformats):
>
> * Name, DOB, Address , e-mail, photos (hCard, adr, geo)
> * Professional info: occupation, education (hResume)
> * Physical attributes: gender, race, height, build, hair colour, eye
> colour, etc.
> * Personal preferences: sexual preference, drinking/smoking habits,
> diet, etc.
> * Other: Culture, religion, marital status, star sign.
> * Descriptions: hobbies, music, sport, reading, general interests, etc.
>
> Other microformats that could be useful for integrating with this would
> include:
> * rel-tag. e.g.
>      <a href="..." rel="tag" class="gender">Male</a>,
>      <a href="..." rel="tag" class="sport">Swimming</a>
>
> * XFN for keeping track of the contacts you meet
> * VoteLinks or hReview for rating the people you meet, would like to
> meet or, perhaps, don't want to meet.
>
> There may be privacy concerns with this type of data, but people are
> already making it effectively publicly available through these sites.
> Plus, the users are still ultimately in control of what info they do and
> do not decide to publish.
>
> With all this data available, it could make it so much easier to find
> and meet up with people.  With it published as microformat, I can
> imagine the possibilities for mashups.  e.g. Using google maps to plot
> people living near you with similar interests.  Integrating it with
> Google Calandar or upcoming.org to organise meetings with people who
> have similar interests in your area.
>
> --
> Lachlan Hunt
> http://lachy.id.au/
> _______________________________________________
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> microformats-discuss at microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>


-- 
- Stephen Paul Weber, Amateur Writer
<http://www.awriterz.org>

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