Format Offering Applications, Finally

One of the "hidden" features of TypePad, which happens behind the scenes when you create a People TypeList, or blogroll, is that an XML Friend of a Friend (FOAF) file is created. FOAF lets you list the people you know, along with a description of yourself and how you know your acquaintances, so that people can search through these relationships. And now that thousands of these FOAF files have been built by TypePad, along with many more built manually by users of Movable Type and other tools, we're starting to see some of the first applications emerge around the nascent standard.

In addition to the venerable FOAF Explorer and the FOAF Query service, a new FOAF search engine has launched, called Plink. Plink, short for People Link, lets you find connections between people using its simple search interface, and the simple, friendly interface hints at a new breed of FOAF application, aimed more at regular users than the geeks and developers who've been working with the format thus far.

The larger goal, of course, is to remove the need for anyone to know the technical details of these sorts of things unless they want to, while still being able to take advantage of the benefits and potential of new technologies. Hopefully FOAF will provide an example for a technology being able to move from early adopters to regular people without anyone having to learn new acronyms and technical terms. Give it a try: Put in the name a weblog author, and see if you can find any friends in common.