It seems I am way late on news lately. Just blame it on work or other lame excuses. Anyway, Eran Sandler of Yedda has created a hCard application for Facebook and has released it last week. It’s nothing special but nevertheless a very fine demonstration of how hCards could look like. If you’re into microformats you might considering adding it to your Facebook account .
The application recreates the publicly available information from user profiles and marks them up with hCard values. So those values are not added to the original profile rather to a copy of it. That might sound stupid to some people but I guess there is no other way around unless Facebook adds hCards to profiles itself. And I think Facebook (and other social networks) should actually do this; Twitter has hCard support for quite some time already. That would make it so much easier to export and import friends and contacts from one network to another; the possibility of importing vCards provided.
But why should social networks let their users export data? I think many people don’t want to add profile data and friends time and again to networks and – probably even more importantly – they want to reclaim control of their data. And if people don’t like the network anymore they will leave anyway, I guess. So why should networks constrain people from exporting that data? The microformats.org website documents two very good examples of importing hCards and XFN to other networks: Dopplr and Satisfaction. This should become standard.
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