MyBlogLog Features hCards

MyBlogLog continues to impress advocates of open standards. After rolling out microformats like <rel="tag"> and XFN, MicroID, and FOAF it announced the addition of hCards and vCards to the profiles of its users last night.

vCards and hCards

Profiles feature two new icons now: one for vCards and one for hCards:

Clicking the vCard icon (that’s the left one), the vCard can be downloaded to a computer and added to a user’s favourite address book. Clicking the hCard icon, a separate page is displaying profile information:

Privacy Settings

People having a MyBlogLog account know that they can add rather private information like their telephone number to their profiles. Though they can decide if this information is publicly viewable, only by their contacts or by nobody. MyBlogLog has added those privacy settings to the hCard and vCard information as well. So if users decide their telephone number is only available to their contacts, other people can’t access that information by hCard or vCard. The same applies for services which parse hCards.

That’s actually pretty cool because this is the first service I am aware of that offers granular privacy settings for hCards. I am sure that this implementation also helps reducing fears that contact information will be widely available on the web without users’ consent.

Well done!