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