XFN encoding, extraction, and visualizations

The XFN microformat is a great way to mark up HTML to describe the relationships you have with people you know, but what can you actually do with that data once you and your friends have put it up on the web? Brian Suda explores this in depth in this article.

( Read the article )

Great post!

Back in 2007 I wrote an article on using parsing XFN networks and
using various metadate from its pages:
<http://sphinx.net.ru/blog/entry/simple-microformat-xslt-extraction/>.

I used Python to traverse all nodes in the network and several XSLTs
to various metadata, such as XFN relations, rel-tags or RSS feeds (so
I could build an OPML of all feeds in the network).

The article is in russian, but here are some links to rich
visualizations at ManyEyes which are still available:

- XFN map:
<http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/xhtml-friends-network-with-twitter>

- Tag cloud from pages in XFN (rel-tag microformat used):
<http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/tags-from-a-bigger-xhtml-friend-netw>

The source is available here: <http://sphinx.net.ru/hg/xfn-spider/file/8a30b90da375/>.

However, today we have Optimus, Swignition and Google Social Graph,
which are more mature and powerful tools.