Thanks for the FOAF
Like many, I now have more virtual friends than "real" friends. In fact, some of these virtual friends feel like "real" friends. And, by "real", I mean people I've seen, touched, hugged, or spoken with directly...face-to-face. But, most of my virtual friends I met through other virtual friends. I have a large network of people who are a Friend Of A Friend (FOAF). And, darnit, sometimes I just want to take my whole social network with me to a new site rather than starting over from scratch.
A small snapshot of one of my FOAF files.
I'm reminded of those Verizon commercials where you look out the window and there they are. Your whole darn network.
Take your social network with you with FOAF + SSL. Thanks, Henry Story, for simple user story #1!
The nice thing is that you don't even have to take your network with you from one place to another, you can do better and have it distributed all around the place. The important thing is that you can link it, like hypertext is linked. No central place of control means everyone can make their decisions locally. That's what democracy is all about!
By the way, you may want to try this service to get you a foaf profile
http://foafbuilder.qdos.com/
It is put together by one of the Semweb startup companies, Garlik.com
Posted by Henry Story on December 19, 2008 at 01:06 PM CST #
I used FOAF-a-matic to create a FOAF file and launched it as an rdf file on this blog. http://blogs.sun.com/humancloud/page/foaf.rdf
I'm still trying to find a way to automatically add my social network from LinkedIn and Facebook...now, that would be valuable!
Posted by Ynema Mangum on December 19, 2008 at 05:02 PM CST #
Hi Ynema. Here's a completely unrelated comment, but I had a thought today I want to share with you. Yahoo! doesn't have a public cloud offering, but has a really similar Open philosophy to Sun, and has some lovely web interface technology in their YUI code. It's so nice that Amazon have used it for their new control panel for AWS EC2. So I was thinking how about you head over to Sunnyvale and meet with Yahoo! to talk about public clouds? Yahoo! and Sun would make an amazing combination - your engineering with their interface and marketing would be a sweet match. Just an idea. Have a great weekend.
Posted by Kevin Hutchinson on January 10, 2009 at 02:28 PM CST #
Sahoo!? Yahun? Hmmm, dunno if those work. But, I love Yahoo. Actually, I think their engineering is where they are strong, and they could do better in their marketing. Don't you notice all the new stuff comes from Yahoo! and everyone else follows?
Posted by Ynema Mangum on January 20, 2009 at 02:00 PM CST #