MicroformatID

Tom Morris was in town today today so I invited him to take shelter from the miserable weather ‘round at Clearleft Towers. Which reminds of something Tom showed me at BarCamp Brighton that I’ve been meaning to share for a while now.

Tom has an hCard on his blog. By default the information provided is fairly basic: an email address, a URL and a vague physical address. Right by the hCard, there’s a simple form that allows you to log on using OpenID. If you log on and you’re on a white list of Tom’s friends, the hCard is updated to reveal more information: telephone numbers and a complete physical address.

That’s pretty clever. And when you consider that OpenID is a URL-based authentication system and XFN is also based around URLs, it would be pretty easy to have the white list correspond to an XFN list on the same page as the hCard.

hCard | OpenID | XFN… it’s like Unix pipes for the Web: small pieces, loosely joined.

4 Technologies for Portability in Social Networks: A Primer - ReadWriteWeb

A nice summary of the technologies presented at my SXSW panel.

Portable Social Networks: Take Your Friends with You [Content]

Brian's article on portable social networks is a clear and concise introduction to the subject with explanations of the technologies involved.

DataPortability.org - Share and remix data using open standards

A new site to track the building blocks of portable social networks: OpenID, OAuth, hCard, XFN and more.

Portable Social Networks at Mashup Camp :: UltraNormal

Kevin Lawver has implemented portable social networks by mashing up OpenID and microformats in Rails. Read the presentation and download the code.