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There's an extension to the <link rel> tag that overloads it by, instead of linking to actual related data (as the tag was intended to do), treats the target of the link as defining a schema / data format, when rel="profile". The URL is then essentially a globally unique key for the data format; parsers that recognize the format will see the key and know how to parse some other information on the page. gmpg.org is the host of one of the early ones, XFN, which is linked in default Wordpress installs.

Standards are attempting to push them self into the world and Buzz supports or will support them. But what is in it for Facebook? Users on other platforms don't bring in the advert money.

The ones of interest are:
PubSubHubbub - http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/
Salmon - http://www.salmon-protocol.org/
WebFinger - http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/
XFN - http://gmpg.org/xfn/

Ideally, it'd work something like this:

If you must microblog, Twitter is fine, or find something else. Most of them can publish to other accounts, and all of them worth considering will have at least an RSS feed, if not SMS.

Otherwise, pick any free blog hosting site, or run it yourself. Blogs already provide the basics of what "social networks" do, especially if you use XFN, but even without that, what do you really do on Facebook? Announce your status, post what you're doing, reply to other people's posts ("write on their wall"), organize events (iCal works, and Google Calendar supports it), link to people you like, follow what people are doing (RSS)... ...it's possible I'm missing what social networking is about, as I don't use Twitter or Facebook, but I also don't get what it adds above the Web itself as a medium. About the only thing I can think of is automatically suggesting certain people you might know, friends-of-friends and such, but I'm guessing anything that could provide that would also provide the exact same privacy concerns.

XFN, the XHTML Friends aims to identify relationships with links.

Imagine if everybody had a blog that used OpenID. This could be decentralized. Friends could then login with OpenId and be identified what relationship they are with the OpenID URL from XFN.

http://gmpg.org/xfn/

There are a bunch of efforts at linking sites and identities together using either HTML or RDF, including XFN and FOAF.

The rel attribute is designed to specify a forward relationship with the current document.

"rel = link-types [CI]
This attribute describes the relationship from the current document to the anchor specified by the href attribute. The value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types." http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#adef- rel

"Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite the conventions used to define the link types. Please see the profile attribute of the HEAD element for more details." http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#type-links

AIM is to Jabber as Friendster is to XFN. Like Jabber, XFN would work great if anyone actually used it.

I cite http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-li nks :

Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite the conventions used to define the link types. Please see the profile attribute of the HEAD element for more details.

Nothing wrong with defining your own link types as far as I can tell. There are many interesting uses for this even beyond applying standards such as DC (Dublin Core). One such use you might find interesting is XFN.

For some more information on profiles, see http://gmpg.org/xmdp/.

In any case, I think that Microsoft's categorical abuse of standards is beyond comparison.

I cite http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-li nks :

Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite the conventions used to define the link types. Please see the profile attribute of the HEAD element for more details.

Nothing wrong with defining your own link types as far as I can tell. There are many interesting uses for this even beyond applying standards such as DC (Dublin Core). One such use you might find interesting is XFN.

For some more information on profiles, see http://gmpg.org/xmdp/.

In any case, I think that Microsoft's categorical abuse of standards is beyond comparison.

XFN already uses the ref attribute to establish relationships to people you are linking to.

FOAF (which PeopleAggregator uses, as do many other sites) and it's relation to XFN are discussed here, and in depth by Leigh Dodds. It would be pretty hard to make something like PeopleAggregator using XFN since it's concerned with typing relations, not describing people. FOAF and XFN don't really compete. (btw, FOAF came first)

An open-source social protocol already exists... not a site, but an XML protocol for marking links as having a social significance. The recently announced Nvu supports links with XFN information. I would love to see if this network supports XFN, so that it could tie into other XFN-compliant networks and sites.