Yahoo has announced that they will begin to support semantic web standards. These standards (hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN) make it easier for users to share their personal information, contacts, blog posts, product reviews and other information easily among websites. This move is part of Yahoo’s broader drive to open up their services. We are about to witness the web become organized in an extremely short period of time.
While I didn’t speak with Mark Zuckerberg about open standards in my interview with him, Marshall Kirkpatrick did and states that “the Facebook CEO expressed disinterest in participating in the Semantic Web.” That’s a bad move by Zuckerberg and could potentially spell disaster for the company.
Conversely, just because the large search engines begin supporting semantic web standards, it doesn’t mean users will immediately begin to benefit from them. Look for web development tools and platforms (Adobe Dreamweaver, Wordpress, Movable Type, etc) to integrate these standards into their existing products, making it easier for users to publish their information even though they are not aware of the formatting standards. Eventually this will make everything much more efficient.
All social networks are going to be forced to embrace the semantic web standards. While it won’t be immediate, eventually users will have access to a single tool that enables them to list and manage all of their contacts. While Facebook is at the forefront of developing such a tool, not supporting semantic web standards will ultimately prove disastrous.
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I agree that it's slightly unfortunate for Zuckerberg that he dismissed the semantic web just moments before a major announcement about it, but I really don't think Yahoo are trying to out-open Facebook as much as they are trying to out-open Google.
Given that links between web pages formed the basis of Google's rise, it is quite extraordinary that they are not the ones to be be making this announcement concerning the 'next generation' of those links.
You're certainly right that social networks will contribute an important part of the semantic web, but the technical challenges lie with the search engines. Yahoo's lead makes it valuable for sites like Facebook to adopt the semantic web, and they will do so easily when the search engines make meaning out of semantic web markup.
Dan
PS. Glad that Facebook recognised your important contribution to their ecosystem when they invited you to interview MZ.
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