Note to innovators: translate technology to users
When I heard about the XHTML Friends Network, I kind of filed it away with FOAF and other technology projects that sound interesting but entirely too academic, since they often offer no immediate means to incorporate them into my sites/tools. When I noticed that XFN was a blogroll thing and that I recently started using some code to extract my blo.gs favorites into a blogroll here on this site, I asked Jim if it was possible to incorporate xfn into the blo.gs tool.
He launched it today and here's a screenshot of the interface for one of my favorites. It's dead simple, letting you click a few boxes and push a button to fill out your relationship info and eventually the info will percolate into my blogroll here on my site.
A lot of new technologies focus so much on the nitty gritty details of RDF, XML, etc and I think developers forget that people won't or can't use any technology until it's got an easy-to-use interface. I know it's important at some level, but I couldn't care less about say, which RDF vocabulary FOAF will use, I only care how easy it will be to add FOAF stuff to my site (best is having something do it automatically) and what cool apps people can build off it.
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