Open Web Standards unify internet

Here is a note on some open standards that are intended to provide greater collaboration among websites, and create a unified Internet for the user. Instead of rephrasing the concepts, I'll borrow excerpts from Wikipedia to display clarity & correctness.

You may also checkout Videntity's social network that combines three recent web technologies: OpenID, XFN, and FOAF.

• OpenID allows people to login to a website using a global identity.
• XFN describes a standard set of relationships and a mechanism for embedding them into links in a web page.
• FOAF provides an RDF/XML format for downloading profile and relationship data.
  

OpenID is an open standard that lets you sign in to other sites on the Web using your openID account. This means less usernames and passwords to remember and less time spent signing up for new sites. How do I use my OpenID? Look for sites with sign in forms that look like this:



XHTML Friends Network (XFN) is an HTML microformat that provides a simple way to represent human relationships using links. It puts a human face on linking. XFN enables web authors to indicate relationships to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding one or more keywords as the 'rel' attribute to their links, as in this markup example:
<a href="http://jeff.example.org/" rel="friend met">...</a>

FOAF is a project under the umbrella of Semantic Web. The semantic web is an evolving extension of the internet in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents to find, share and integrate information more easily. A popular application of the semantic web is Friend of a Friend (or FoaF), which describes relationships among people and other agents in terms of RDF.

If you are interested in open standards, you may also want to check out Broadband Mechanics. The Broadband Mechanics’ strategy is to help change the world by providing the software and open standards necessary to inter-connect disparate social networks and blogging tools together.