Orkut message - LJ FOAF

[crschmidt]

Since I've seen a lot of demand for FOAF from orkut, I thought I'd post a message to my friends on the site, a lot of whom are semantic webbers. This is the post I made to my Friends of Friends network on orkut - a message that got sent out to 750+ people

Comments

[revgeorge]

I think it was Scott McNealy who said "The value of a network is the square of its nodes." FOAF certainly is more valuable today thanks to your efforts to add 2 million more data sets, and I think 2004 will be the year for FOAF. I don't understand why people in a crowded environment like social networking sites wouldn't make it easy for people to bring their friends in quickly and easily with FOAF.

I think that the killer apps might come in different forms too though. I like to think SongBuddy will become a killer app when someone creates an FOAF-reading plugin to get recommendations, but there's also spam filtering, webs of trust, and more. I think that they will come from sites like LiveJournal exporting their friendship data for other people to analyze, rather than people hand-generating them.

I still can't understand why sites wouldn't support FOAF. It's like Prodigy or AOL back in the day before they supported SMTP. They thought they could just ignore the rest of the world, and once they started paying attention they actually started doing well.

Thanks again for all your hard work on this.