XFN and FOAF were two small steps in that direction, and Google just built on them with the Social Graph API (watch the friendly little video intro).
Any day now we’ll see an application that not only helps us generate XFN and FOAF data, but does so in a way that manages our online identities, particularly with regards to search. It’ll tip the balance of art and science in SEO toward science.
Top-down semantic web visions were judged by skeptical-but-realistic critics to be overly systematic. Well, yes, but if we get there a piece at a time, helping people understand, implement, experiment, and capitalize with each little piece, we’ll get there in an organic way.
Time to go generate some XFN…
This is quite amazing, but how will the connections be represented in the UI? Seems there’s no vision of the user experience baked into this technology at this time. Sure, you can do whatever you want with it, but I imagine that that’s what’s going to happen: there’ll a bizillion ways to navigation, and only a few will be good.
RE>Seems there’s no vision of the user experience baked into this technology
That’s the beauty of it, a thousand flowers will bloom and the fittest will survive.
RE>there’ll a bizillion ways to navigation, and only a few will be good.
That’s why you should design one, yours will be good!