| ▲ | nashashmi 3 days ago |
| I remember this being somewhat talked about in 2005. It was like an alternative to Friendster. But no one ever made a feature from this. Is this still a thing? |
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| ▲ | deaddodo 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| It’s a barely hashed together spec for associating webpages. It doesn’t seem to offer any of the “value” that social networks do, the prime of which being an easy-to-initialize profile with copious features. It could be possible with nerds/geeks. However, that group (in the early 00s, at least) was far more interested in keeping their online anonymity prime and avoiding social networks; so I could totally see why it was dead in the water. |
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| ▲ | wwweston 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > It doesn’t seem to offer any of the “value” that social networks do, the prime of which being an easy-to-initialize profile with copious features. It might be this is a feature, not a bug. Making things easy did help a lot of people connect in at the start, but connecting in the careless also has hazards, much less the content casino digital media has become. | | |
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| ▲ | riffraff 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Around 2007 or so I worked on a semantic web search engine. Among other things it ingested xfn (and foaf) so you could reasonably look for things like the connection between you and someone else who had a webpage, but the whole thing by itself didn't replace in any way what social networks were already offering, e.g. your feed, or direct messaging. I think WordPress still supports xfn links, but it's not particularly useful. |
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| ▲ | mcdonje 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >the whole thing by itself didn't replace in any way what social networks were already offering, e.g. your feed, or direct messaging. It didn't get to that point, but there's a lot that could be possible if the graph were owned by everyone instead of just the social network owners. Distributed trust, moderation, etc. | | |
| ▲ | riffraff 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah that's always been the dream, but I'm afraid at this point I'm convinced noone wants that, because everyone just wants content to be consumed on their platform, not be available for everyone to reuse and remix on their own. That's imo the real reason semweb, microformats etc.. failed. We're left with a bit of schema.org that just plays into Google's SEO tactics. |
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| ▲ | skeezyboy 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > what social networks were already offering, e.g. your feed, or direct messaging by social networks i assume you mean specifically facebook, twitter etc and not IRC or any of the other pre-existing social networks that simply didnt have profile pages or comments sections |
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| ▲ | est 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Is this still a thing Today's webpages are mostly a big pile of javascript generated Single-Page-Application™ So no it's not a thing. The HTML is barely parsable. |
