This week’s issue of the excellent Digital Web Magazine leads with an article I’ve written about Distributed Social Networking, published under the title Portable Social Networking: Building Blocks of a Social Web
It’s an overview of distributed social networking in a microformats context, explaining how XFN and hCard gives us most of what we need to start exposing users to the benefits of having information made available between different social sites.
As well as explaining how to go about publishing these things and explaining what the first iteration of consumption could be, I’ve also tried to emphasise how important it is to guide users into this interconnected world gently, since many won’t appreciate that their information is quite so public.
It’s a little lengthy, but I hope it gets people thinking about the possibilities.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.