everyone posts twitter feeds now and it doesn’t seem to be slowing.

people are always @replying each other, and it’s trivial to link a reply to the user page

it could be cool to build a web of relationships instead of just replies

So just store the XFN relationships globally. It could be multiple identities (my twitter, my email, my website)

when you run across an identity (in a feed or other) you can tag the link with a relationship instead of just contact info

since it can span websites, there’s nothing stopping everyone from being connected this way on every site that uses XHTML

since the relationship is XHTML, you can use any tool that you normally use to format it. I’m just throwing out ideas but the possibilities are bigger than these quick thoughts:

use CSS2 to visually indicate relationships. a[rel~=foo]

• highlight your own links within content
• put a graphical icon next to certain groups, or color code them

use javascript to enrich links

• show and hide groups on event lists

dataviz awaits

• a real-time 6 degrees app
• something i’m not clever enough to imagine yet

mobile integration

• it would take a little setup, but phones could learn new methods of contacting your friends just by browsing your data across various websites.

I’m sure you’ve heard of twitter

It’s basically a stripped down, one line blog that everyone contributes to. You get to pick who you hear from, that’s the pertinent info.

we’re used to the idea of pages being connected on the web, but now we have the opportunity to link individuals through their presence across the web.

Twitter is a good example because people communicate both with people they have met, and others who they only know of through the internet. You can get a more accurate idea of someone’s social network through their candid communication than a carefully maintained profile.

If social networks implemented this feature, think of the web of people you’d have in an instant!

Facebook for example wouldn’t even have to add any features to the site, just use the logic they generate from the Friend Details users already provide.

There are many websites that already record XFN-type data to varying degrees, according to their niche:

• Facebook, MySpace, Virb
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Digg

ToDo

• parse multiple identities within a single string
• some sort of logic to automatically determine contact type
  • email
  • website url
  • twitter username
  • ??
• some sort of logic to create friends when you run across new usernames
  • if I @reply someone, I must have some opinion of them, so next time I login, prompt me to distinguish ‘new’ friends I have told the DB about (simply by communicating with them)
• an easy/advanced option
  • easy: do all hyperlink creation and just alter the feed’s content
  • Advanced: add another field to the feed, let people process it on their server

Bugz

• a lean list!

Have you heard of the XHTML Friends Network (XFN)?

it’s a simple way of distinguishing how you relate to the people you hyperlink to

for example, if you are linking to a friend that you work with, you would designate this person:

rel=”friend met co-worker”

Have you ever tried to use XFN for any length of time? Constantly tending to it can get cumbersome if you are hand-coding the things! I go through spurts but eventually get lazy.

combine the XFN rel values with the Google-recognized “nofollow” value (also belongs inside ‘rel’) to effectively tell the web “I negatively associate with this person”