The usefulness of social graph depends on how many people would
publish their relationships with others. I observed XFN around 2 years
ago, and nowadays XFN or open social still haven't yet got spotlight
of popularity.
If you would publish some of your relationships to the web, what would
you do? hand-craft some XFN codes or go to http://gmpg.org/xfn/creator
?
Look a bit redundant.
You already have your contact info stored in your address books on PC,
Web, or mobile phone, why should you key-in the info again?
Most address book programs in PC and Web support category/group, and
some of the categories may represent relationships between you and the
contacts. So basically you may have categories like:
Colleague
Friend
Relative
Acquaintance
Business
Obviously, it is a bit overkill to create categories like:
Parent
Spouse
Children
But you may put the contact info of your parent and children into
category Relative.
It is logical to create XFN tags from contact info of your address
book.
So the next step is to map categories into XFN profiles as defined at
http://gmpg.org/xfn/11. For example, Colleague -> colleague, Friend-
>friend, Relative -> kin, Acquaintance and Business -> acquaintance.
And the next question is, does your favorite support such feature?
MS Outlook? no, Gmail Contacts? no, Yahoo Address Book? no.
Open Contacts? yes.
Open Contacts does not really have a built-in function for such
feature. However, because Open Contacts can export selected contacts
with info of categories into XML, it is straightforward to transform
the XML into XFN tags using XSLT. And this XSLT was developed. Please
check
http://www.fonlow.com/opencontacts/Developer/publish_selected_contacts_to_xfn.htm
You may either use the offline XFN creator or your favorite XML tool
to do transformation. By the way, as you might have different settings
of categories, you might need to edit the XSLT file to change the
mapping between categories and XFN profiles.
If you want to publish selected contacts stored in MS Outlook, Outlook
Express, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird and Vista Contacts etc., you may
import/sync the contacts into Open Contacts first.
References:
