[uf-discuss] XFN is getting smoked by FOAF

[David Janes]

Weird -- I was just doing the same research and came up with somewhat
different conclusion! Sorry for the formatting here -- just cut and
paste from a spreadsheet. I'll have a look at your list though to
include in my master ;-)

Site	Format
Buzznet	FOAF
Del.icio.us	N/A
Digg	Custom, hCard
Facebook	API
Flickr	XFN
Jaiku	XFN
Last.fm	XFN
LiveJournal	None
Ma.gnol.ia	XFN, hCard
MSN Spaces	a mess
MySpace	API
Picassa	no
Pownce	XFN
Soup.io	no
StumbleUpon	Custom
Twitter	API
Typepad	FOAF
Tumblr	No export
Upcoming	Custom
Wordpress	No
Vimeo	Custom
YouTube	Custom
Vox	XFN

Regards, etc...

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 8:32 AM, Costello, Roger L. <costello at mitre.org> wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
>  I have been doing some digging into social networks that use XFN vice
>  FOAF.
>
>  Thus far, the only social network that I have found which uses XFN is
>  metafilter.com For an example, see:
>  http://www.metafilter.com/usercontacts/292  Thanks Scott Reynen for
>  pointing me to it.
>
>  Supposedly WordPress.com uses XFN but I have not been able to
>  demonstrate this (I have an account on WordPress and have tried
>  repeatedly to demonstrate the use of XFN but to no avail).
>
>  Conversely, I discovered that FOAF is used by many social networks.
>  Here is a list of 28 social networks that use FOAF:
>  http://esw.w3.org/topic/FoafSites
>
>  Here's an example of the use of FOAF on livejournal.com
>  http://danbri.livejournal.com/data/foaf (View >> Page Source to see the
>  actual FOAF document)
>
>  Another thing that I have discovered is that the relationship
>  information provided by FOAF is just "knows", e.g. Alice knows Bob.
>  XFN, on the other hand, has a rich set of relationship information,
>  e.g. Alice is a friend, co-worker, neighbor, and kin of Bob.
>  Furthermore, XFN is a much lighter-weight approach (just add the
>  relationship onto a link) than FOAF (create a complex RDF document).
>  So it would seem that XFN provides a richer and lighter-weight set of
>  information and would be a better choice for social networks.
>
>  WHY IS THERE SUCH LITTLE USE OF XFN BY SOCIAL NETWORKS?
>
>  /Roger
>
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-- 
David Janes
Founder, BlogMatrix
http://www.blogmatrix.com
http://www.onaswarm.com
http://www.onamine.com