Friend of a Friend (FOAF) What is this
Friend of a friend okay, so what is this you say. Well, it is about your place in the Web, and the Web’s place in our world. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online.
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.
I posted an image of this interaction to better assist you in understanding just where you are in this socially connected web and better to help you understand the complexities of having your data spread throughout the web. It raises questions as to who owns your personal data. If you think that because it is yours you “retain rights of possession” you would be making a grave error. Or can you take your data with you?
The answer to that is no you can’t some social sites eg. facebook surrounds itself in a walled garden they let you and your friends in but you cannot pack up and move to another social network. So who owns your data? Interesting stuff…
The answers are going to come I believe this year as it has become a serious debate and the focus of attention so changes will occur fast.
