It is nice to have friends around. So does everyone else.
I just came across an interesting website xhtmlfriends.net which provides a crawler for XFN, as well as a visualizer for friends network. I think if someone in Windows Live Spaces team haven’t heard of XHTML Friends Network (XFN) yet, it is better to have a look now.
XFN is simply a XML standard that adds descriptions to a normal link to your friends’ blogs. The descriptions can contain information such as “Have you met this friends before?“, “Are you in the same residence?” and etc. In general, it describes how close the relationship between you and friends. The link to a friend’s blog can be seen as an identification of your friend. For example, here is the XHTML of the link to Sui’s blog:
<a xhref=”http://inexist.spaces.live.com” rel=”friend met colleague co-resident”>
In my website, there are a bunch of links written like this. So they can be identified by XFN services, for instance the list of all my friends by simply give my website URL (”wangxiaohu.com“).
An more advanced example is that, for a given a website with XFN supported, networks of friends can be visualized instantly, such as this one. In the graph, each person is presented as a node and the length of vectors intuitively indicates how close two person are. In contrast, mine is much more simple, since none of my friends blogs contains XFN description yet. 😛
However, it seems that Friends Explorer in Windows Live Spaces does not support XFN, or have something like that yet. If it does, it will be cool, since Spaces is well integrated in the Windows Live Messenger and thus more acceptable by large group of users.