It is nice to have friends around. So does everyone else.<\/p>\n
I just came across an interesting website xhtmlfriends.net<\/a> which provides a crawler for XFN, as well as a visualizer for friends network. I think if someone in Windows Live Spaces<\/a> team haven’t heard of XHTML Friends Network<\/a> (XFN) yet, it is better to have a look now.<\/p>\n 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?<\/em>“, “Are you in the same residence?<\/em>” 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>:<\/p>\n <a xhref=”http:\/\/inexist.spaces.live.com” rel=”friend met colleague co-resident”><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 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<\/a> by simply give my website URL (” 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<\/a>. 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<\/a> is much more simple, since none of my friends blogs contains XFN description yet. \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n However, it seems that Friends Explorer<\/a> 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<\/a> and thus more acceptable by large group of users.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n
wangxiaohu.com<\/code>“).<\/p>\n