At Plaxo, we've been interested in the Friend-of-a-Friend Project (FOAF) for some time, and we're trying to figure out the best way to FOAF-enable our service. We've taken a small step so far by making a page where any Plaxo member can link to a FOAF file generated from their Plaxo cards. Plaxo lets you keep a public (business) card and a private (personal) card, and you can share either or both as FOAF. For example, see Joseph Smarr's public FOAF file. We also have an HTML version that shows a business card, but we thought it would be cool to make a FOAF version that users can publish on their web sites and that always stays up-to-date.
Here's how you can make your own Plaxo-hosted FOAF file:
- Join Plaxo, either by downloading our plugin for Outlook / Outlook Express or by signing up for our web-based address book.
- Go to www.plaxo.com and sign in.
- Click on "Edit Your Cards" (on the left) and then click "Add a link to your cards from your website".
- Select which card(s) you want to share and the URL will be generated below.
- Copy the URL and add &f=1 to the end of it to get the FOAF version (this is currently a hidden feature).
You can now use this URL anywhere as your FOAF file. Note that we display your e-mail addresses both as clear text and as SHA1 sums. We decided to do this since we already display e-mail addresses in the HTML version. We could add an option to turn off clear-text e-mail addresses if people would like that feature. Also, note that we don't share much of the contact information in your Plaxo card using FOAF because the vocabulary doesn't support it (e.g. work address, job title, etc.). Is there some standard way to add extra contact info to FOAF files? Basically we store what a vCard would store--and note BTW that you can download an auto-generated vCard from the HTML version of the shared contact info page.
We're currently looking for suggestions on how Plaxo can do more with FOAF. If you have ideas, please let us know.
