What’s in a FOAF anyway?
August 10th, 2008
I’ve been doing some research on Web 3.0 and semantic search. There are a lot of exciting and groundbreaking new technologies emerging that could reinvent the Internet. It will become increasingly important for web marketers and digital strategists to stay on top of these advances—there are numerous communications and marketing applications.
One of these new technologies is the Friend of a Friend project, or FOAF. FOAF is an XML-based method for organization and cataloging the relationships between people’s profiles. By understanding the relationships between people, data, and relationships, FOAF attempts to build a uniform method for sharing the types of information users store on social networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn. In fact, a great example of FOAF-like technologies is the “People You May Know” feature on Facebook.
The real promise of FOAF is to create a new data model that will suggest connections between people and—more interestingly—people and information.
Just imagine the value this type of data and intelligence could have to marketers and advertisers. Online ad targeting hasn’t evolved much in the last five years. Protocols like FOAF may be the catalyst to take online advertising to the next level. Imagine being able to target a campaign based on psychographics. Understanding how your target market operates on the web is one thing that FOAF can help to define.
Clearly there are issues with the technologies. Not only has adoption been slow and held back by the confusion and inherent geekiness that’s held back the growth of the semantic web. There are also many issues about security and data protection. Regardless, these technologies are on the move and it won’t be long until the possibilities seen with FOAF (and similar protocols like XFN and SIOC) are realized.
Anyone can create a FOAF profile. You can use a this wizard to create the file and upload it to your website.
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