Marc points at l.m. orchard : Talking about the problems of creating the same profile data over and over again on social networking sites.

Here's the crucial part. But since then, I just haven't felt the need to replicate self-disclosure anywhere else but on my own site. We need both ends of this. We need the social networks to be able to import the data. But we also need the personal blog software to support an "About Me" page that maintains and publishes the master copy. There continue to be major challenges around this area.

- Master "About Me" page, with export, in common personal software
- Standards for either a schema to describe people or ways of building it on the fly
- Standards for transferring that data
- Implementation of account creation using profile data from elsewhere
- Ways of keeping everything in sync.

And this all raises questions of exactly where the data should reside. The sync problem suggests it should never move and stay on the master site. We'll just include it at run time. But that works against being able to generate added value from having lots of that data in one place. And there are commercial pressures pushing sites towards keeping their local copy.

Now you may say "we have standards". But right now they're all flawed and there's too many of them. FOAF, VCard, HCard, XFN, SXIP.


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[ 19-Aug-06 8:18am ] [ ]