This post announces release candidate 1 of xFolk, an xhtml microformat for social bookmarking as popularized by del.icio.us and a growing host of other services. Microformats are conventions for conveying information on the web in a way that is easily machine processible. Users can then experiment with ways of presenting and combining it. These experiments are, in effect, a sort of low-cost R&D, that web publishers may choose to capitalize on as they pan out.
Lest this scenario seem pie-in-the-sky, in the recent past, advanced users have used web data to create new interfaces to services and combinations of services that have proven quite popular. As an indication of these experiments' perceived value, profitable web companies like Google and Yahoo have recently invested in further opening their data to them.
Open microformats like xFolk make it possible for all players to profit from the experimentation of advanced users. All a bookmark service provider need do is spend an hour to adopt the xFolk microformat for their site, and they can adopt user-generated innovations based on the format. Expect to see these soon.
Today, I moved the xFolk specification to the microformats wiki, a new site announced at the time of Supernova 2005. The wiki should provide a more interactive forum than the previous method of publishing the specification through blog posts. This most recent version, xFolk RC1, is backward compatible with xFolk 0.4 so that work with this prior version of the format is still valid. There is space on the wiki for implementers to add implementations and issues. Changes since xFolk 0.4 are also detailed on the wiki as well as expected steps going forward.
Thanks
Tantek Çelik and Ryan King really helped with transferring xFolk to the wiki. Tantek, in particular, has been patient in mentoring the transfer.
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