Unquiet Desperation

If you were following my Twtter feed last week, you already know that Tantek Çelik came to Mahalo last week to educate us on the use of [[[Microformats]]]. He was an engaging speaker and sat with the development team for the afternoon, pointing out places we could use some of the existing specifications.

This morning, we deployed the first round of Microformat-enhanced profiles. Those of you with the Operator toolbar for Firefox (and Flock) or the Safari Microformat plugin will notice the following when browsing:

• hCards:  You can download information about your friends using hCards, which is based on the vCard spec and can be loaded into your address book.. (Right now, the data is sparse, but as more features roll out, we’ll work to add the data where appropriate.)
• Tagspaces: We’re making sure that profiles include the rel=”tag” wherever tags are used, for ease of searching out similar topics.
• xFolk: All the recommended links on the profile come bundled with meta info, like the tags and comments.   We’re looking at importing xFolk from other sites down the line as well.
• XFN: Friends and fans are now tagged with XFN rel tags, with an eye toward social graph applications.

The idea of the semantic web is something we talk about quite often, and we’re glad to be working in that direction. As usual, if you have suggestions or thoughts, feel free to leave comments here or contact me directly.

Tags: microformats, mahalo, Tantek Çelik, xFolk, XFN, hCard