{"id":532,"date":"2004-02-19T22:17:54","date_gmt":"2004-02-20T03:17:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=532"},"modified":"2004-02-19T22:17:54","modified_gmt":"2004-02-20T03:17:54","slug":"is-xfn-worse-than-foaf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=532","title":{"rendered":"Is XFN worse than FOAF?"},"content":{"rendered":"

You might think that XFN<\/a> would be even more even more decentralized and emergent than FOAF.
\nBoth are decentralized ways for individuals to describe their social relationships, in contrast to the centralized social networking services from Friendster et al. XFN uses hyperlinks to describe the linker’s relationships with the linkee, while FOAF (friend of a friend) uses a file in XML\/RDF format listing all the friend relationships.
\nThe reason that hyperlinks are generally such a nice way of showing emergent patterns is that they reflect millions of tiny choices that individuals make about what’s relevant.
\nBut the XFN site anticipates that the primary use of XFN will be in blogrolls. If that’s the case then the relationship is buried in markup, in a list that doesn’t change very often. This replicates one of the major problems with relationship profiles — they are static, while relationships change slightly with every interaction.
\nAm I really going to update my blogroll to add a “met” attribute for Kevin Marks<\/a> after meeting him in person at Etech? That kind of micro-maintenance will happen even more rarely than people clean their closets.
\nKevin Marks’ “vote links”<\/a> are a much simpler and likelier use of expressive hyperlinks to show emergent opinion. The choices are simpler — vote-for<\/i> and vote-against<\/i>. They let users express distinctions they want<\/i> to express. In an article about Diebold’s ghastly security holes, you can link to Diebold with a vote-against link.
\nBy contrast, do people really want to declare a relationship as a “crush”, “date”, or “sweetheart”? (These are real XFN vocabulary terms). Imagine the agony of deciding when to switch from “date” to “sweetheart”. Is it after the first kiss, or the third date, or flowers, or what?
\nLink emergence works when the links are frequent and simple. XFN won’t create link emergence, because the links are static and complicated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You might think that XFN would be even more even more decentralized and emergent than FOAF. Both are decentralized ways for individuals to describe their social relationships, in contrast to the centralized social networking services from Friendster et al. XFN uses hyperlinks to describe the linker’s relationships with the linkee, while FOAF (friend of a … Continue reading “Is XFN worse than FOAF?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-8A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}