rel=me/XFN consuming app

[Bob Ngu]

As some of you know, I have been working on a rel=me/XFN consumer app,
thanks to Kevin for his SG example app, it got me started. It's very
much work-in-progress but you can check it out @
http://www.jiggyme.com/vanitybadge.html.

The basic idea is to extract rel=me and contacts information from a
page with XFN markup and create a vanity badge that one can later on
use on his blog as a widget of sorts, it should be self-explanatory
once you take a look at it. If you don't have a profile page with XFN
markup, you can use http://kevinmarks.com, http://bradfitz.com, or
http://epeus.blogspot.com/

There are some issues or limitations with it currently
1) The biggest issue is that I am not sure how to make some of the
rel=me URLs more human readable. At first, I displayed the URLs in
full but that turned out to be ugly looking and long in some cases.
Next I trimmed it down to just the domain name but then it looks like
there are duplicate entries, for example, if you put in a digg user
profile, it only lists other digg users as contacts. You can use this
digg profile if you don't have one handy, http://digg.com/users/videomeister63.
So I decided to parse out the username from the url and now I get
output like digg.com (arestme), etc which is much better. However,
there are so many corner cases since there isn't a standard url format
for identifying users making it human readable. Some examples of
problematic urls ( in terms of human readability) are:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500033387
http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=oBWvYxHrbjVHZGRu17VG2g
http://www.flickr.com/photos/15738836@N00/
http://www.meetup.com/members/65/
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=bradfitztube
https://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A37AO372T3VFJ6/102-7089831-8815313
http://www.google.com/s2/sharing/stuff?user=115863474911002159675
aim:bradfitzpatrick
xmpp:br...@fitzpat.com
mailto:br...@danga.com
http://www.blogger.com/profile/18338939297948690534
2) "Your Name" and "em...@blah.com" are placeholders for now

When I look at the actual page like http://bradfitz.com/, he has nice
human readable names next to the URLs, however since they aren't part
of XFN, I can't retrieve them using an XFN parser. Ideally, those are
the values I want to retrieve along with the URLs but there isn't a
way to do that with the current XFN standard. I sent an email to Kevin
and Tantek to get their feedback and maybe consider extending XFN to
include this use case. I imagine that this might be useful for other
XFN consuming apps as well.

I believe this shouldn't be a problem with FOAF since FOAF has
separate fields for name, nickname, URL, etc, so at this point I
consider this a XFN limitation. I have a number of feature
enhancements I can work on but I would like to get your feedback
first, so please let me know what you think. Thanks.

[danielabarbosa]

bob- just took a look- good work and i look forward to the end product
i agree with you about readable format- especially for the services
whose 'userid' is not the userame name.


i noticed that the icon picture however is pointing to your
profile :http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/bobngu/