FOAF can FOAD
For those of you lucky enough to have not heard of this, FOAF is ‘friend of a friend’. FOAF is an xml format, to basically describe ‘people’. Stuff they do, like, think, masturbate to, have a vague interest in, and so on. It also includes contact info, and all the usual nonsense.
The point of all this is to in essence describe and encapsulate oneself and one’s relations into a ‘machine readable’ format. The point of that, in turn is…well it’s hard to tell. Make friends? Be cool? Meet yet more random strangers on the internet to stand in as virtual friends?
The first time I came across this, I thought it’s a joke. Someone was making fun of how ridiculous xml is, and invented FOAF as a satirical statement on the dire uses xml is put to these days. Alas, this is not the case, people seem to genuinely, truly believe this is a Worthwhile Endeavour. That describing yourself, and meeting people online with similar interests who are a few degrees of separation away is still as interesting and exciting in 2003 as it was in 1995. Now, I’d understand it if it were some sort of lame dating service, or clearly billed as a tool for the idiot masses who inhabit the internet. Sadly no, it’s pretty much a tool for techies to behave like utter tools.
To get an idea of the sort of genius this idea attracts, go to foaf-project.org and look at the getting started page. Note the comments. My favourite is ‘Need a new friend.’.
Setting aside the ludicrousness of using xml for this, or the point of it all, has nobody thought of how very 90’s it is to assume that a person can be encapsulated in a few simple online words? Are you really going to be attracted to or interested in someone who happens to enjoys reading books, watching movies, and writing? Much as I hate this particular form of abuse, but how socially dysfunctional can you possibly be for that to be appealing? Are you so utterly incapable of conducting any sort of communication that the only way you can manage is by FOAF-supplied info to fall back on?
What’s truly depressing is the amount of energy and effort that people have poured into this crap. They could have been out there making a difference, planting trees, preaching world peace, solving the middle-east crisis, advocating a two party system in the US, saving whales, work for an aid agency helping African societies decimated by AIDS (no US aid for them of course if they also preach contraception and family planning), but no, they instead make up little xml documents that define their humanity, or lack thereof. Grrrr.
September 29th, 2003 at 10:10 am
I’m looking for EOAE (Enemy of an Enemy) files - ‘cos they are friends too, right?
September 29th, 2003 at 10:20 am
Let me look in my crystal ball over here… I see… The EDI of internet dating dervices.
Useful? You bet! If it moves a single moron from #java to a dating service, it’s a good thing. A pity it might lead to them giving offspring though.
September 29th, 2003 at 11:33 am
And of course you need a dating WebService for geeks to exchange their FOAF payloads with each other
September 29th, 2003 at 11:38 am
Good one.
September 29th, 2003 at 11:38 am
All this FOAF crap spun off from RDF stuff as far as I can determine, whose usefulness has yet to be demonstrated to me in any great depth. The two biggest uses of RDF data is the later version of RSS files (which to be honest were just shoehorned into RDF format as they ‘kind of did the same thing’) and FOAF. The only legitimate use of FOAF I can see would be perhaps in geneology circles, or perhaps in the behind the scenes storage for sites like friends reunited or something. As for geeks carrying their FOAF around as proof they have (at least imaginary) friends? Well I guess everntually it’ll make playing the 6 degrees of kevin bacon (http://www.geocities.com/theeac/bacon.html) easier…
September 29th, 2003 at 1:45 pm
are you serious. people seriously do this kinda stuff? wow..
September 29th, 2003 at 2:10 pm
>are you serious. people seriously
>do this kinda stuff? wow..
come on…
are you serious. people seriously read that kind of blogs? wow.
September 29th, 2003 at 3:24 pm
Hey, look how popular Friendster is. People lap this sort of thing up.
I was thinking of coming up with a competing standard, and calling it FOAD.
September 29th, 2003 at 3:27 pm
Erk. Managed to hit post before I finished my paragraph. Never post before the first cup of tea. The last comment was supposed to end:
… But now you’ve gone and used up the joke.
September 29th, 2003 at 4:34 pm
You Bastard Hani, I love FOAF. Thru it I’ll recruit the thousands of millions of the Java Cartel Process (TM) and Sun will have to listen to us ya know. Fuck you I won’t do what ya told Sun. No way… you gotta know your enemy and it’s Sun, you bastars, hhaaaahhh! haaaahhh! There’ll come a day when someone besides me will start posting on my foruns and we’ll kick Sun’s but! Allow me to provide a link to my pretty good looking website where you’ll find some insightful discussions between myself and I: http://viva.sourceforge.net
Btw… swing sux, Viva XUL!
September 29th, 2003 at 9:28 pm
So much for “privacy concerns”. Spammers are always welcome to spam-me@mailinator.com though .. :)
September 29th, 2003 at 9:54 pm
Does anyone know of a FOAF plugin I can use in Eclipse.
September 30th, 2003 at 12:32 am
I like you! You’re my friend Hani!
Oh… you also like Java too?!
September 30th, 2003 at 2:53 am
Actually, this is a good use of XML… it is just a bit of data after all, and I assume there is a nice little DTD too (can’t be bothered to look into FOAF… sounds a bit naff).
I can think of far worse uses for XML… like trying to turn it into a scripting language (ie. Jelly, or dare I say it, Ant even), or other similar such absurdities…
September 30th, 2003 at 12:54 pm
Hani, FOAF is an RDF thing, not an XML thing. I suppose that’s not an important distinction for your purposes here; but you really should have a look at RDF some time — it’s a delightful “solution desperately seeking a problem”, and I’m sure you could write a marvellous BileBlog entry about it.
I figure the primary purpose of FOAF is to get people to supply test data for RDF tools.
September 30th, 2003 at 12:58 pm
Hey, why bother contributing when you can just make a negative rant, right?
Everything’s got it’s place. That you don’t see yourself using Foaf is obvious. Fortunately others do.
We all have our places to contribute. That you prefer they go about it planting, protesting, preaching and such is fine. I’m sure there’s a fair number of folks that think those ideas are rather daft.
Who’s wrong? Does it matter? No, not at all. But it’s all the fashion these days to say something stinks instead of helping out.
Here’s a thought, if the efforts you’re espousing now aren’t reaching people how is adding a new style, using online and XML tools, a problem? It’s not.
The more the merrier.
September 30th, 2003 at 10:52 pm
Hehe. Why contribute to idiocy? No matter what brain power gets thrown at it it’s still idiocy.
Are is the typical liberal dogma of intentions matter, not results or substance?
October 1st, 2003 at 7:04 am
“The point of that is…”
In talking about being socially dysfunctional etc you are entirely missing the point - this is about using machines to create and enhance channels of communication automatically. Augmenting human capabilities in this way could potentially help social disasters like the situation in the Middle East or the US electoral system.
Back in the immediate environment, an example of the point would be, for example, if I find someone’s blog interesting my client will be able to follow through their FOAF file to find other blogs that are likely to interest me. Or if I know in advance that a blog only contains negative write-ups, I may not want it in my blogroll.
Anyhow, whether you like it or not, this stuff has already come out of geekland, with automatic support for FOAF being provided in TypePad. Have you done the “blogging is lame” post yet?
October 1st, 2003 at 10:08 am
Blogging IS lame - have you read the bileblog?
October 1st, 2003 at 5:34 pm
Now, now … there’s no reason to spew bile here.
October 1st, 2003 at 9:16 pm
Wooo Hooo! If only FOAF had been around a while the whole mideast problem would have been solved or avoided. World peace is certain now. Hani, how in the hell can you say FOAF is dumb now?
Perhaps you should crown this man.
December 16th, 2003 at 4:23 pm
Aww… c’mon man, put the tags in for FOAD. I need something to keep me snickering at work. :-(
February 12th, 2004 at 11:13 pm
Laugh it up….FOAF is about to be implemented on Roller. - http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/roller/roller/src/org/roller/presentation/velocity/FoafServlet.java