XFN, relationship minefield
Although I’ve been aware of the XHTML Friends Network microformat, XFN, for some time—and was only recently reading about its genesis in John Allsop’s Microformats book—I’ve not previously had the need to use them. This site lost its blogroll somewhere around the second design iteration, and client work doesn’t offer very many opportunities to tag your nearest and dearest, so my first real hands-on experience came courtesy of this year’s dConstruct backnetwork, “the online space for d.construct 07 delegates”.
One of the features of the backnetwork is the ability to tag other attendees using the pre-defined XFN relationships, which fall into four categories—Social, Physical, Professional, and Romantic:
- friend: Someone you are a friend to
- acquaintance: Someone who you have exchanged greetings with
- contact: Someone you know how to get in touch with
- met: Someone who you have actually met in person
- co-worker: Someone who works with you, or in the same organization
- colleague: Someone in the same field of work/study
- muse: Someone who brings you inspiration
- sweetheart: Someone with whom you are intimate
Leaving aside some obvious problems with the definitions as provided (do I have to mark everyone attending the conference as a ‘colleague’? And why is ‘muse’ defined as a romantic relationship—I may find Joe Clark inspiring, but that doesn’t mean I want to jump into bed with him!), one is left with the need to formulate a strategy for selecting the correct tag—and, in turn, seeing how other people categorise their relationship with you.
XFN is people!
The sole Physical tag, ‘met’, is the easiest one, although even here there are degrees of meeting—is simply being in the same physical space sufficient, or do we need to have exchanged a significant amount of communication to qualify as having ‘met’? I chose a fairly liberal interpretation, although I’m sure some of the people I have ‘met’ don’t remember the occasion; Drew McLellan, for example, hasn’t ‘met’ me, even though we have met on several occasions—although he does consider me an acquaintance as opposed to my ‘contact’ tag for him.
The Social tags, ‘friend’, ‘acquaintance’ and ‘contact’ were more difficult to choose—what promotes someone from acquaintance to friend status? And what, really, is the difference between being an acquaintance and a contact? And what is the etiquette when someone you have labelled a mere acquaintance considers you a true friend—must you reciprocate? It was starting to feel like being back at school.
In the end, ‘friend’ became anyone that I have spent a significant amount of social time with, or alternatively someone I would be happy to let kip on the floor at a moments notice; acquaintances are those who I have met and shared a conversation or three with; and contacts are usually a purely professional relationship (often through Digital Web).
Professionally, there is only one real co-worker who has registered on the backnetwork, so the ‘colleague’ tag became “someone who does roughly the same sort of work as me, whether professionally or not”—so Christian Heilmann becomes a colleague through a shared interest in JavaScript, as does Rachel Andrew for the similar sort of freelance work we do; but Paul Farnell does not, being more of a business guy than a web-dev.
But in the end, does any of it really matter? It’s just another social networking doohickey to fill in with all of the same people I’m connected to on every other social networking site—albeit with the additional need to assess our relationship on several levels.
Filed under: Internet, Events.
Technorati tags: xfn dconstruct07 backnetwork microformats
Bookmark this article with del.icio.us
Previously: BarCamp comes to Cambridge
Next: The Great Global Number Meme
Comments
- Gareth Rushgrove
- 928 days ago
Me and Drew Twittered bout this ealy in the week too. Given contact means someone you know how to get in touch with and the backnetwork provides a mechanism for doing that between everyone on it – everyone should have been marked contact as well.
- #3
- Matthew Pennell
- 927 days ago
True. I went with contact as meaning “someone that I might actually get in contact with”, as opposed to just someone that I can get in touch with—as you say, that could be virtually anyone.
- #4
- Drew McLellan
- 927 days ago
Defining XFN relationships falls down for me when filling out the backlog, as is the case with Backnetwork. Basically my memory sucks, so until I have a record of these things (as an XFN-based tool provides) I don’t always make the name-to-face associations.
Next time we meet (dConstruct?) please feel free to shout at me, and in the meantime, do accept my apologies for not realising that we’ve met. I suck.
- #5
- Matthew Pennell
- 927 days ago
Heh – not a problem, Drew; I didn’t mean to single you out. ;)
- #6
- Paul Annett
- 927 days ago
I’m with you on this one, Matthew – that side of the Backnetwork is quite a minefield! We’re Twitter contacts and I’m sure we’ve met briefly, but I couldn’t tell you when or where. But we’re down as ‘met’, with you listing me as a ‘contact’ and I you as an ‘acquaintance’ – but which is it? And where do we go from here? Hopefully we’ll meet (again) at this year’s conference, and move our social relationship up a notch, so to speak. God its all so formal. Can we be friends yet? ;-)
- #7
I know what you mean. I always feel a bit embarrassed defining relationships in such a ‘matter-of-fact’ way, and where to draw the lines between the categories.
I’m always worried that someone I’ve spoken to previously that I’d call an ‘acquaintance’ isn’t going to have a clue who I am when faced with just a name and an avatar.