SXSW 2004

Ridiculously Easy Group Forming

Tantek Çelik

web hobbyist

tantek.com and favelets.com

perhaps most well known for opening the Pandora's box of CSS hacks. But before that I helped code and ship IE5/Mac, the first browser to meaningfully support HTML4 and CSS1.

Why does easy matter?

• Easy means more people can do it
• Easy means more coders write more tools
• Easy means more tools sooner
• Easy is more democratic
• Easy is for the rest of us

How do you do easy?

• Keep it simple
• Start ridiculously simple
• Solve one problem

  "Small pieces loosely joined"

• Don't try to build it all
• Work with other easy technologies

Blogs and blogrolls forming groups already

• Blogs are fastest growing part of the web
• "Hello My URL is... " name tags
• People are already linking to each other as URLs
• Logical next step: add relationship info

Xhtml Friends Network (XFN) conceived

• Just add 'rel' to your blogroll links, e.g.

  
  <a href="http://dana.example.com">dana</a>
  

  with XFN:

  
  <a rel="friend"
  	  href="http://dana.example.com">dana</a>
  

• Valid (X)HTML!

SXSW 2003 inspirations

• During a panel Q&A, John Halcyon Styn asked:

  I want some way to know if someone has actually met someone else...

• which inspired the XFN "met" value

  
      <a rel="friend met"
  	      href="http://john.example.com">John</a>
  

XFN released

• December 2003, Version 1
  • http://gmpg.org/xfn/
• Work of a few folks
  • Matthew Mullenweg, Eric Meyer, Tantek ‚elik
• Previewed by a few more
  • http://gmpg.org/xfn/thanks
• Everything Creative Commons licensed

XFN is easy!

• Easy to type by hand
• Works with any (X)HTML
• Simple set of values
  • http://gmpg.org/xfn/join
• Open source XFN Creator wizard UI
  • http://gmpg.org/xfn/creator

XFN: In only three months:

• hundreds of users, thousands of nodes
• numerous tools
  • WordPress, MT template, Blosxom plugin
  • blo.gs, blogrolling.com
  • XFNifier, XFN favelets, Exefen
• search engine: Rubhub.com
• more: http://gmpg.org/xfn/more

XFN: Next steps

• Popular requests going into XFN 1.1
  • rel="relative" - outside immediate family
  • rel="contact" - less than "acquaintance"
  • rel="me" - connect the sites that represent you
• Join the community feedback loop
  • Try out XFN: http://gmpg.org/xfn/join
  • And send feedback to: feedback@gmpg.org
• Presentation available online:
  • http://tantek.com/presentations/2004sxsw/xfn.html