January 29, 2007
FOAFed at last...
After seeing a blog post just over a week ago with a graphic demonstrating how to reach at least 600 000 people with 19 contacts via FOAF (friend of a friend) connections, I thought I should get round to creating my own FOAF record.
A quick trawl of generators turned up things like FOAF-a-Matic, which I've come across several times before, and which generates a FOAF record from details you provide via a web form. It's then up to you to save this file and host it somewhere.
This is all very well, but what if I don't have anywhere to upload the FOAF record to?
Suppose, for example, that I want to manage my identity - and things that relate to it - from a single, hosted service (albeit one that I can trust)?
OpenId has been getting a lot of press lately (partly because of this excellent screencast) and I've been looking at it in the hope it can simplify cross-application working in StringLE. I've been playing with an account at MyOpenID, but it's pretty minimal, just offering OpenID services.
idproxy.net looks interesting too (I've only just come across it this minute) - this service lets you log in with a Yahoo Id using Yahoo's authentication system/API, and then provides OpenId services on top. Google also have an web app authentication API, [5/2/07 - and there's now a Microsoft passport/identity API too][19/2/07 - and here's OpenID for AOL users] ] so it'll be interesting to see if idproxy go on to incorporate this, and maybe become the Meebo of open identity systems?! (How much trust would you have to have in that service, I wonder?)
Anyway, it was gratifying to see a new service - videntity.org - that provides OpenID hosting as well as FOAF management and vcard export.
The service is pretty basic at the moment - you can't yet usefully add a link to a friend's FOAF record, only their homepage - but I'm hopeful that the service will develop (automatically pinging the semantic web after every FOAF record update would be handy, I think?)
I've started tentatively, just adding a minimum of personal information and a couple of contacts, to a record stored at http://psychemedia.videntity.org/foaf.xml.
To browse the record, I've pinched a link I found on Tom Heath's site: browse my FOAF record.
Using a templated, hosted service potentially limits how comprehensive my FOAF record can be, of course (Tom's FOAF record shows just how wide a range of information the FOAF record can store). If I can't edit the FOAF file directly, I can't add fields to the FOAF record that aren't supported by the editing forms provided by the host.
That said, videntity.org does offer quite a range of form options:
This service has a nice feature that lets you add new friends to your own FOAF record - sort of; click to add a friend, provide the URL of your current FOAF file, and it will generate you a new FOAF record containing the the details of your new friend (which you can then use to replace your old FOAF file).
What I'd really like to be able ot do, of course, is see the browser sort of functionality incorporated into something like videntity.
Only more so...
Here are two visual editors that would be useful in the context of FOAF management.
Firstly, a FOAF navigating equivalent of Geni, the viral, visual family tree editor.
(What happens when you get this service "interoperating" with FOAF family relationships, I wonder?!)
Secondly, this delicious network explorer (thanks for the link, Mike:-):
This tool lets you explore delicious networks. It also displays the number of delicious fans a user has, although this looser network is not browsable. [I wonder how hard it would be to feed my delicious network details into a FOAF manager and automatically have the members of my delicious network added to my FOAF record?]
(Just by the by, I wonder if anyone has built a 'degrees of separation' tool that identifies the connections between and two individuals with delicious users, or the delicious distance between a user and a given URL, or between two URLs?)
Posted by ajh59 at January 29, 2007 10:13 AM