«
»

SmugMug supports XFN & FOAF

Read over on O’Reilly Radar about David Recordon’s post at Six Apart entitled We Are Opening the Social Graph. He talks about the emerging tools and technology to allow shared social graphs, like OpenID, XFN, FOAF, and others.

Given that Thursday night is ‘Release Night’ at SmugMug and I had a few minutes to kill, I felt inspired and whipped up XFN and FOAF support to compliment the partial OpenID support SmugMug already has. (I apologize for not finishing our OpenID implementation yet, but I’m finding OpenID 2.0 to be a complete disaster and find myself at a loss as to what to do. Anyway, I digress…).

I’m absolutely positive we’re barely scratching the surface, and people like David will set me straight, but at least we’re making forward progress – 150K SmugMug accounts now have auto-discoverable FOAF, embedded XFN, and are OpenID endpoints.

What does this mean for you? It means, hopefully, that SmugMug can play nicely with other social applications on the web. Your network of friends & family is now published in machine-readable formats so that other networks can do intelligent things with that data. How exactly this will happen remains to be seen, but there are lots of bright people thinking about it, so hopefully it’ll happen.

At the very least, when the Semantic Web actually works in the year 2022, SmugMug will be ready. :)

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that these technologies do properly obey your SmugIslands and other related privacy settings to protect you should you not want to share this information.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 1:25 am and is filed under business, smugmug, smugmug releases, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.

4 Responses to “SmugMug supports XFN & FOAF”

  1. Open Social Web Now: #2 at Like It Matters Says:
    September 23rd, 2007 at 6:07 am

    [...] That inspired the folks at SmugMug to add XFN support for 150k accounts and counting.  Brady Forrest noticed this, and asked for more examples at the O’Reilly Radar blog. [...]

  2. David Peterson Says:
    October 6th, 2007 at 4:16 am

    How do I access FOAF and the XFN stuff? Is it part of the API? Thanks.

  3. SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » SmugMug & DataPortability.org Says:
    January 23rd, 2008 at 12:12 pm

    [...] already supports OpenID (and better support is coming), XFN & FOAF, RSS, Atom & KML, and has a rich API to both store and retrieve your [...]

  4. Dan Brickley Says:
    January 28th, 2008 at 12:49 pm

    Hey, this is cool :) Sorry, only just noticed it.

    And now I feel bad! I was grumbling about SmugMug (and MySpace) in my blog, … the story about private photos being brute-force discoverable… but I should’ve asked your side of the story first. So my apologies there. Maybe we just disagree about whether predictable ‘private’ URLs are a problem; but I should’ve asked before grumbling in public.

    Re FOAF, XFN etc., do you have any plan to allow users to tag “this picture depicts this person” more explicitly than using ambiguous tags. That would be cool for extracting social graph data based a bit more on the real world, and less on what people feel obligated to say. See old prototypes over here. http://rdfweb.org/2002/01/photo/ … it could probably be built on top of tags (and in Flickr, machine tags). Facebook have similar construct too, and accessible to their own APIs.