hcard-xfn-supporting-friends-lists

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Revision as of 20:21, 22 January 2008 by Tantek (talk | contribs) (add Implement import XFN friends lists section and implementation recipe)
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hCard+XFN supporting friends lists

Welcome! If you have an account on any of the following services, you already have a list of your friends' hCards with your relationship to them in XFN which you can provide to other services to save time by either importing or subscribing to social network information so you can change it on one site, and have other sites automatically updated, rather than having to re-add/remove all your social network contacts multiple times everytime you meet a new person, decide to unfriend someone etc.

Services with hCard+XFN supporting friends lists

The following web sites support hCard+XFN on their friends lists and are thus suitable for importing/subscribing to other sites that support hCard+XFN. Alphabetically sorted. Feel free to add sites with hCard+XFN supporting friends lists here. Please include a link to the site home page, and instructions for retrieving your the URL of your hCard+XFN supporting friends list on that site.

  • Cork'd - login and copy the URL which should start with http://www.corkd.com/people/
  • Dopplr - login and note that your user page has hCard and XFN for your contacts (site is private beta)
  • Last FM - login, click the "Friends" tab, and copy the URL which should look like: http://www.last.fm/user/[username]/friends/
  • Ma.gnolia - View your contacts page http://ma.gnolia.com/people/[username]/contacts . Note issue(s).
  • Nsyght - Visit your profile page and select "view all" on the friends component. Should look like this: http://www.nsyght.com/friends/[username]/
  • Soup - On user profile if the "Friends list" element is displayed (on by default), else at /friends
  • Twitter - login, click on "Your profile" at the top, and copy the URL

Services that import hCard+XFN supporting friends lists

The following web sites support importing your existing hCard+XFN supporting friends lists, e.g. from the above sites. Alphabetically sorted. Feel free to add sites supporting hCard+XFN import here. Please include a link to the site home page, and instructions for how to import friends on the site.

  • Dopplr - as announced login and go to http://www.dopplr.com/account/fellows_from_hcard to import (site is private beta)
  • Nsyght - Register for an account to import from Digg, Pownce, Last.fm, and Twitter (site is in public alpha)

Services with XFN supporting friends lists

  • 3eep - each user's friends are linked to with XFN is located at http://3eep.com/users/[username]
  • CouchSurfing profiles have XFN Friendly friends lists (e.g. Guaka's).
  • LiveJournal - login, click on the "Profile" link, and copy the URL which should start with http://USERNAME.livejournal.com/profile where USERNAME is your LJ username. E.g. [1]. LiveJournal profiles have complete friends lists marked up in XFN.
  • Wordpress.com and any other blogs using Wordpress 1.5 or later have XFN supporting blog rolls.

Services with XFN rel="me" supporting identity consolidation

Implement hCard XFN supporting friends lists

Want to implement hCard+XFN on your site so you can list it here?

  1. Markup friends with hCard. See the hCard authoring page for how to mark-up names, links, icons of people in friends lists with hCard.
  2. XFN on friend links. Friends lists should be marked up with XFN per XFN clarifications: mapping community site friends. See also the XFN: Getting Started page for how to markup links to people with XFN. See also the hCard examples: hCard and XFN which demonstrates this and the previous step quite well.
  3. rel="me" to a user's other URLs. Hyperlinks to users' home pages or blogs should have the XFN rel="me" attribute to support user-driven (since the user chooses the URL to link to) identity consolidation.
  4. rel="me" on "View All Friends..." links. If a user profile page on your site links to a separate page for that user's friends list, add rel="me" to that link.
  5. rel="me" on friends list pagination links. If your site paginates a user's friend list into multiple pages, be sure to add rel="me next" to your "Next" pagination hyperlinks, and similarly rel="me prev" to your "Previous" pagination hyperlinks.


Please also consider implementing hCard user profiles.


Implement import XFN friends lists

Want to implement importing (and preferably subscribing to) XFN friends lists on your site so you can list it here?

In addition to implementing hCard XFN supporting friends lists yourself (see above), do the following:

  1. Provide a user interface to "Import Friends" (like a button or menu item)
  2. When chosen, provide a text input field for the user to enter their profile URL (such as their blog or XFN friends list URL). If you already have the user's "Website", pre-fill the field with it, or if the user has many "Other Profiles", pre-fill the field with the first, and let the user pick any of them with a Select pop-up menu, or provide the user the option to just import XFN from all of them at once.
  3. Parse the XFN at the URL(s) given (links with rel="contact" or "acquaintance" or "friend" etc.) and check to see if there are any users on your site with any of those links as their rel="me" "Website" or among their rel="me" "Other Profiles" and add them to a list of people to invite. Crawl any symmetrical rel="me" links, especially symmetrical rel="me next" and/or rel="me prev" friends list pagination links for additional URLs to parse for XFN. Consider also parsing those URLs simultaneously for hCards that have those XFN links as class="url" hCard properties, and if the hCards have additional contact information such as instant messaging or email, add them to the list of people to invite.
  4. Present the list of people to invite, perhaps sorted by "closeness" of XFN relationships (e.g. list family relationships before just romantic relationships before just friends before just professional relationships before just acquaintances before just contacts before just met etc.) with a "Add Friend" button next to each. When clicked, use XHR to add that person without altering the overall list, and change the Add button into a Cancel button. Perhaps put an "Add all" button at the top (or bottom) to let the user simply add everyone listed with one click.
  5. Consider also providing a checkbox "[x] Subscribe to XFN friends" which would automatically run this import perhaps once a day and notify the user of new contacts found that they may want to add, and similarly present an "Add all" button.

For more information

In addition to the previous "Implement" sections, see the hCard authoring page for how to mark-up information about a person with hCard, and XFN getting started page for how to mark-up friend links with XFN.

Join the microformats community, in particular the #microformats IRC channel on irc://irc.freenode.net#microformats and the microformats-dev mailing list, and send a message stating that you'd like to add hCard to the profiles and hCard+XFN supporting friends lists (and importing thereof) to your website.

Please also consider implementing hCard supporting user profiles.

See hCard+XFN supporting friends lists issues for issues, problems with implementations.

See also

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