More on Social Networks

A few days ago, I blogged about FOAF. Since then I’ve been more aware to simple solutions/approaches to the social face of the technical web. A few days after I stumbled across XFN /XHTML Friends Network), another very simple way to represent social relationships through annotations on the most used presentation language on the Internet: HTML. What else is out there ? In the lack of a widespread adopted mechanism to represent user data and human relationships, there are many proposals laying around waiting for fame and fortune:

Personal Data Representation:

FOAF – Friend of a FriendVCard – Electronic Business CardXMDP – XHTML Meta Data ProfilesProfile JEP – Jabber Profile JEP proposal

Relationship representation:

XFN – XHTML Friends NetworkFOAF – Friend of a FriendXMPP – Jabber’s Rosters

Centralized Services:

Orkut – Connects people through a network of trusted friendsFriendster – Orkut’s cloneYahoo 360 – Friendster’s cloneRubHub – XFN Relationship Lookup Engine