Search Monkey’s results do tend to fluctuate a few percentage points, even hour by hour, so you may see different numbers, both lower, and over time, higher and higher. Here are a few recent hCard deployments that no doubt contributed to crossing the two billion mark:

1. Basecamp adds hCards: people and companies

Just a few days ago, Jason Zimdars of 37 Signals reported that Basecamp has been updated to support hCards for people and companies, and is now looking into more uses:

I’m pretty happy with this added functionality so I intend to explore using hCards in other parts of our apps where it makes sense.

Thanks to Jeremy Keith for making the request and following-up with 37 Signals.

2. All .tel domains now support hCard

And just yesterday Telnic announced that all .tel names now support the hCard microformat

3. Over 14 Million of Gravatar Profile hCards

About a month ago, Automattic’s Gravatar launched public, linkable profiles for all Wordpress.com users , beautifully presented and marked up with hCard, e.g. check out Beau Lebens’s profile:

That’s another 14+ million hCards (figure from WordPress.com), each representing an individual blogger on the public web.

4. Over 20 Million BrightKite hCards

Finally, just before microformats.org’s 5th birthday on this past June 20th, developers of BrightKite informed us that they’ve fully implemented hCard on all of their 5.5 million registered user profiles and 16.5 million venue pages – another 22 million new hCards. Thanks for the birthday present BrightKite!

94% of rich snippets markup

All of these deployments come from the powerful combination of: 1. microformats ease-of-authoring (the easiest way to semantically markup people, venues, etc. in HTML), and 2. the fact that search engines like Yahoo and Google index microformats and make them visible in their user interfaces.

In May of 2009 Google launched Rich Snippets with support for microformats and RDFa, with a set of content partners like Yelp who all chose to use microformats to produce rich snippets in Google search results.

Starting with support for hCard, hReview, hReview-aggregate, and hProduct, over the past year, Google added support for hCalendar and hRecipe as well.

For all of these, Google provided side-by-side examples for each snippet type in multiple formats (microformats, RDFa, microdata), which in many ways has helped to demonstrate how much simpler/easier microformats are in many respects (and some of the promise that microdata shows for more general extensibility).

As recently reported by ReadWriteWeb, Google themselves reported at the Semantic Technologies conference that when Google finds data for rich snippets on pages, 94% of the time that data for rich snippets is marked up with microformats (40,091 vs. 2,514, conservatively assuming none of of those pages contain both, if they did, the 94% number would be even higher).

Photo credit: Read Write Web: Google’s Semantic Web Push: Rich Snippets Usage Growing.

The numbers comparing hCard vs. alternative person markup are particularly staggering:

• ~30x more person snippets use hCard (33,675 vs. 1,160).

This is no surprise, as The State of Web Development 2010 survey showed nearly an order of magnitude gap, that is far more (6x more) web developers use microformats in their day to day work (34.52% use microformats vs 5.63% use RDFa, per the survey).

Given many more web developers are using microformats, it’s not surprising that Google is finding more microformats than alternatives. What is interesting though is that while 6x more developers use microformats, Google is finding 16x more microformats for rich snippets than alternatives.

One could conclude from these two numbers that developers using microformats are 2-3 times more net productive in terms of number of pages produced with rich snippets. This net productivity could be because microformats are easier (take less time) to author, and possibly that microformats are easier to get right, and thus have Google recognize them, as compared to alternatives.

Making Micoformats Even Simpler

Still, we can do even better than that. And no, I’m not just talking about going from 94% to 99+%.

The Google presentation slide noted that the results were out of one million web pages sampled from the Internet. Out of that, only ~40,000 had microformats. Given that nearly every web page mentions people, organizations, events, or some other popular microformat, that number should be much higher.

Thus there is much room for us to improve, and in particular, based on feedback, from Google, Yahoo, from numerous smaller companies and independent web developers, we can and should make microformats even simpler. Simpler to write, easier to get right, and ideally, even more micro – less code, less page weight. Starting with a few ideas brainstormed a couple of months ago, there’s now a few folks working on a “microformats 2.0″ to achieve these goals.

Do you have feedback or ideas about how microformats could be made even simpler and easier for authors?

Please add your thoughts to the “microformats-made-simpler” wiki page.

Have you implemented hCard profiles on your site?

Add your site to the hCard supporting user profiles page.

Thanks to all of the hard work and contributions by everyone in the microformats community for an excellent fifth year of microformats.org. Here’s looking forward to even more microformats accomplishments in our sixth year.

hCalendar

One of the original, and certainly most obviously useful formats, hCalendar has made major head-roads in being adopted across the web as a standardised way to mark-up event information. Those who took the time to add this format to their site are now reaping the benefits, with Google clearly making the most of this rich data.

hRecipe

hRecipe is certainly a relatively young format, but always looked to be a promising starter bringing the timeless interest of geeks and food together.

With a view to make organising your summer BBQs simpler this year, Google have made a major update to their search result pages which now highlight recipes in the results, showing important information such as ratings, cooking and prep times. The information being displayed is formed from extracts of hRecipe marked up data.

Mark Wunsch, a developer for FoodNetwork and Prism parser, who now finds his microformatted recipes displayed on Google search results pages had this to say:

When we revisited our recipe pages on FoodNetwork.com a few months ago, it was one of our priorities in Front End Engineering to embed hRecipe. We knew that it would be only a matter of time for tool support to come along to utilize our recipe data. As Front End Engineers, we have real control over what are pages output, and we have a real opportunity maximize the amount of data that a tool like Google can glean from our markup. It would be a poor practice to not take advantage of microformats when something as powerful as Google recognizes their importance.

There’s further work to do with ironing out the kinks in the hRecipe format, but I think this certainly shows the benefit of being an early adopter and getting these formats out into the wild for real stress-testing. Congratulations to all those involved!

With Google now officially supporting these two formats, plus people and reviews, we eagerly anticipate their further adoption of additional microformats into Rich Snippets.

• new hResume and hCard implementations
• beautiful hCards, MySpace hCards
• new tutorials and developments

new hResume and hCard implementations

Madgex’s brand new hResume importer powers the Guardian UK’s recently launched Guardian Jobs CV Match service. The site YIID (Your Internet Identity) now also supports importing hResumes.

Open source parsing libraries continue being developed for numerous languages. The latest, as noted by Tom Morris on the parsers page, is the Java library org.microformats.hCard written by Reinier Zwitserloot.

beautiful hCards, MySpace hCards

Personal hCards have been around for years, but recently we’re seeing more and more web designers publishing their online identity using beautifully styled hCards, superb complements of form and function. Three in particular:

• Tim Van Damme
• Rogie King
• Jared Hanson

All three make good use of CSS for styling and layout, and Javascript for dynamic effects. The last of the 3, Jared’s, is more simply styled than the other two, however if you look closely, his list of instant message network addresses also display his live availability on each, a really nice touch.

Got a beautiful hCard you want noticed? Add it to the hCard examples in the wild wiki page.

It’s important to highlight individual hCards like the above, as continued proof that people do write web pages, HTML, markup in general, by hand. Even when such pages are generated from a database used fill out an HTML template, a person still writes the template by hand. And it’s important to highlight those that update templates as well to support microformats.

The list of social network sites with hCard profiles continues to grow, this time with a big addition: MySpace.

As of about a month ago, all new MySpace profiles, and all current users who upgrade their profile to version 2.0, automatically get hCard support, as confirmed by MySpace’s platform developers.

new tutorials and developments

Behind all these new microformats implementations and sites is a vibrant and active community, not just here on microformats.org, but across the web as a whole, and across web development communities as well.

The standards-championing Dev Opera community recently published a wonderful article on Styling and extracting hCalendar by Christopher Schmitt, and updated it with use of the value class pattern for better accessibility.

Safari Books Online and New Riders have made published a video, Designing with Microformats for a Beautiful Web, by well known web designer Andy Clarke.

And finally, last but not least, this past month saw the resolution of all outstanding issues on both hCard and hCalendar, paving the way for updates to the specs, FAQs, and 1.0.1 drafts, incorporating important errata, updates, and brainstormed improvements.

The microformats community was quite busy this summer, and September brought a lot of forward progress. October is shaping up to be even more impressive.

For more microformats updates as they happen, be sure to subscribe to the microformats discuss mailing list and the @microformats Twitter.

Clearly, it all begins and ends with the people who participate: we were thrilled to have several dozen developers and designers drop in over two days. Over thirty folks went further and donated at the door, but more importantly, everyone contributed their time and enthusiasm.

Applying the lessons of prior devCamps, the group proposed dozens of ideas and came together around 7 projects. Many of them ended up sharing their results as open-source on github; others created bespoke sites and yet other conversations impacted projects folks were already working on.

In an increasingly online world, I think the primary lesson of this devCamp was Robert Cailliau‘s classic quote, “there is no such thing as a virtual beer.” It’s refreshing to see that putting this many bright and opinionated folks in one place, at one time, actually results in concrete progress. I’d like to think at least a little of the credit is due to the minimalist philosophy of the microformats.org movement…

Probably the only serious glitch was softwear-related; our initial rush t-shirt order didn’t turn out as we expected, so we’re spending a bit more to order new, higher-quality shirts. In the interests of transparency, we will be posting the full, final details online once those are printed and mailed out.

Of course, an event of this magnitude requires more than just a volunteer labor of love: it takes real resources too. Huge thanks to our sponsors!

The venue, hosted by Automattic, proved first-rate, with wonderful spaces for separate teams to collaborate, along with an awesome bar and views of the San Francisco Bay.

“Spinn3r is a web service for indexing the blogosphere. We provide raw access to every blog post being published – in real time – so you can focus on building your application, mashup, or search engine.”

“CommerceNet is an entrepreneurial research institute that invests in exceptional people with bold ideas.”

“Oomph: A Microformats Toolkit is for web developers, designers and users, making it easier to create, consume, and style Microformats.”
“mBLAST spiders data daily to power search, product directories, publisher sites, buyer’s guides, and other mashups.”
 
Individual donors also pitched in personally, such as Carla Borsoi, Vice President, Research & Analytics at Ask.com; and Steve Ganz, Principal Web Developer at LinkedIn.com. Thanks also to Cindy Li for the wonderful microformatsDevCamp logo and buttons, and to Object Adjective for microformats stickers.

PS. Check out more cool photos.

Developers, designers, and all sorts of other microfolk are welcome to pitch in during this coming weekend, July 25-26, at one extremely cool venue: Automattic HQ, off of Pier 38 on the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

We began raising support for this event by collecting individual donations at the birthday party — thanks again to Object Adjective, Ribbit, and Spinn3r for their generous support of that event! We’re going to continue that at the microformatsDevCamp with a suggested donation of $20, which will also get you one of our limited-edition commemorative T-shirts!

Automattic HQ

In addition to Automattic’s offer to host the event, we’re currently seeking sponsors for the DevCamp itself, particularly for food and drinks. In keeping with our informal structure, we’re encouraging sponsors to pay for items directly; for example, Cindy Li is providing buttons and Object Adjective is bringing stickers. Our latest confirmed sponsor is CommerceNet, a long-standing partner that’s underwriting the opening night dinner.

Please ask your employers and other sponsors to join in — they can contact me, the “sponsor wrangler,” directly as rohit at khare dot org. We’re expecting 30-50 developers to join in, so even as little as $250 can have a real impact towards creating new tools, new applications, and new user interfaces for microformats!

And, of course, sign-up to participate by adding your name and interests to the  microformatsDevCamp wiki page!