XFN: Ask People First?

A common feature of all social networks is the ability to add friends or contacts to your profile. That’s why it’s called a social network, right? Though often those friendships don’t have to be reciprocal. I can add hundreds of people as my friends without anyone adding me. The reasons can be manifold: others are just too lazy to add me as well, they don’t like me, their definition of friendship is different from mine or maybe they don’t even know me. There are probably much more reasons. Furthermore social networks are managing their friends feature differently. Usually I will be notified if someone has added me as a friend and sometimes I can reject this.

Though if I add XFN (XHTML Friends Network) values to links to other people they don’t get notified about them. Besides rather general values like friend, contact and acquaintance I can also add more personal ones like neighbor and even muse and crush. Those values describe a very personal relationship between two people which go far beyond terms like contact and even friend. There are also search engines like Rubhub which search sites for XFN values and make them public. What do people think about this? Are they comfortable with it?

Don’t get me wrong, I like microformats and I like XFN; I even added XFN values to some sites in my blogroll. I am just wondering if I should ask those people if that’s fine with them. Should it even be mandatory to ask people before adding XFN values?

I have read a blog post about the same topic on another blog a couple of weeks ago; however I can’t remember the blog anymore. So if this sounds familiar to you, please leave a comment and tell me where you have read about it. Thanks.