This is interesting - I think Google are starting to utilise public XFN data in their Google Profiles service.
If you’re not familiar with XFN, the XHTML Friends Network is a great place to get started and find out more. Basically, XFN provides a set of tags that can be used to ‘mark up’ hyperlinks so that information on the web represents real personal relationships. As an example - if you’re using Firefox to browse the internet - right click on these next two links, click on properties and take a look at the relationship field:
And this is a link to my Dad’s blog.
I think XFN is very cool, and likely to play a big part in managing individual online identity, as more and more social interactions are carried out through the web. Google seem pretty interested in the XFN standard too - last year releasing the Social Graph API that made use of XFN and other publically availalbe mark up data to determine relationships between personal web pages.
And now I’ve just noticed that Google Profiles appears to be making use of XFN. I was updating my profile this evening and noticed that the service was recommending a few additional pages to be added to my profile.
When I entered my Typepad blog, my profile refreshed and added a few additional suggestions - all of which I had previously added to my sidebar up there on the right and marked up with XFN rel=”me” tags a little while ago:
I’m really pleased to see Google indexing and building use of XFN (and presumably FOAF) data into their services, there are so many potential uses for web services that can accuratley and securely identify you and those you like to interact with. Another sign of Google’s emerging social network ambitions prehaps?
