And in fact the first ever social network, FOAF, was pretty much exactly what he describes. It's basically just a microformat that can be used to describe a person, and then anyone can make their own client to do what they wish with that data. And I think there were maybe twelve or so people who ever used it.
And then Mark Zuckerberg came along and said, "Hey, if I take this microformat thing and turn it into a unified experience, this social networking thing might actually take off."
'... , FOAF, was pretty much exactly what he describes. ...'
This is one area I've been looking at carefully ever since I created a flickr account and had a b@gger of a time trying to find, add friends from flickr. But one thing I found trying FOAF ( http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/ ) was some of the assumptions. Email for instance. Going through quite a few friends I noticed they all removed 'specific' email accounts replacing them with either web forms or generic accounts.
Aside from this the spec is pretty good & has been around since Y2K. As for most social network sites (roach motels) it is not in their interests to allow leakage. I haven't checked if Fb allows you access to friends (yep, found perl WWW::Facebook::API::Friends using facebook.friends.areFriends) ... so while you can extract information using the API Fb does not markup the client side.
Maybe the approach is to create a FRIEND PROXY SITE that abstracts your social network above social sites? Something that ...
- allows you to login
- allows friends to login
- add various social sites that you frequent
Transparently ....
- use api's (where possible) on sites to extract friend data
- create master list of friends (noting url + relationships etc)
- updates this list at regular periods
- pay to export all friends & associated relationships
Simple idea of allowing network of friends to be linked & captured. Now is there are real demand for this? (I doubt most users frequent more than 2-3 sites.) But if you have to re-enter 5xfriends to 50xfriends & associated details maybe this is viable.
This is a flaw in the microformat crowd. It assumes the markup exists in each site. The plus side is it's easy to implement. It only takes Facebook.
"... Really, that seems to miss the point. If all you want is to know who your friends are then you wouldn't need any website at all ...."
Have you tried to re-find your friends after moving to another social site? Thats the problem. It's not having a site of just friends it's about being able to re-build your social network on new sites at a level above. A means to independently store, record & modify your own network not relying on the clumsy & ill-conceived tools that new sites pass for adding existing friends.
You would think that companies would try to improve this. Doing it right could mean the difference between so-so and good membership sign-ups.
And then Mark Zuckerberg came along and said, "Hey, if I take this microformat thing and turn it into a unified experience, this social networking thing might actually take off."