#smclondon08 blogging - “Native to a Web of Dudes”
The topic title had me curious, so let’s see what happens! Fresh from the talk on how to write good headlines (according to The Times Online), perhaps this would better have been entitled ‘Native to a Web of Britney Spears on Viagra’ - who can say.
David Thompson hails from Cambridge. A self professed geek, he draws on material from talks by Tom Coates, Ben Ward and Tantek Celik to give a presentation on microformats. The first half of his presentation seems to covering familiar ground, although I’m grateful for the list of names and terms to take notes from.
Immediately interesting to me was the informtion about Yahoo Fireeagle, which I had not previously heard of - think geo-location mashup, and if you can’t, ask… Another interesting point was that microformats don’t take off until they are adopted (Kelkoo, Flickr).
‘Ambient Intimacy’ seemed to be the hot topic, prompting immediate discussion and questions from the group. DO we really care if a friend wants to tell us they are eating a burger right now somewhere in the world? I didn’t find an answer to that. Indeed, there are many interesting deeper unresolved issues in this area, too many for this blog post.
XFN gives us one means to avoid David’s pet hate - that when you join a new social network (assuming you haven’t succumbed to Social Network Fatigue, the ‘CBF’ of the 21st century), to find your friends, they often ask you for your email or messenger password so they can log in and find them… a cardinal sin and a huge security risk. Other means are available too - Facebook and Twitter’s publicly exposed friends or follower lists. Directly using these would be ‘creepy’ - what’s the One True road?
In reality, XFN - or the idea of XFN - gives us a means to follow everything we are interested in, as long as it has an RSS feed, or perhaps a VCard or HCard. David mentioned FriendFeed and a tool written by my colleague David Singleton as a good start to an implementation - I resisted the urge to jump up with pride.
What I really took home from this presentation was that information does not always speak for itself. David Thompson’s bold uneasiness at public speaking was eventually endearing, but I think he could have kept the attention of the non-techy person who left the room (’I'm sorry, it’s not you, it’s IT!’) had he re-ordered some of his points for catchiness instead of putting them in dependency order like every good programmer is used to.
Overall: thought provoking and informative.