The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

FOAF on Wikipedia offers useful links to exploring the concept.

Edd Dumbill‘s article ‘XML Watch: Finding friends with XML and RDF‘ provides some introductory insights into what FOAF can do.

It’s an instance of the Semantic Web, really, described by Wikipedia as a project that: "intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by giving meaning (semantics), in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web. Currently under the direction of the Web’s creator, Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium, the Semantic Web extends the ability of the World Wide Web through the use of standards, markup languages and related processing tools."

Leigh Dodds‘ FOAF-a-Matic is a tool to create a FOAF description of oneself. As Leigh describes: "FOAF is a way to describe yourself — your name, email address, and the people you’re friends with — using XML and RDF. This allows software to process these descriptions, perhaps as part of an automated search engine, to discover information about your and the communities of which you’re a member."

‘Click to the clique‘, Ben Hammersley‘s article for The Guardian, explains the concept further: "(…) the US sociologist Stanley Milgram who developed what he called the "Small World Hypothesis", which said, in effect, that everyone was connected to everyone else by six degrees or less (…)"

People describe their connectedness with others in a decentralized way, by uploading FOAF files to the Net. Software robots can access these FOAF files, and present the aggregated contents in an organized manner.

The projected result is that people can then view the chains of acquaintants between themselves and any other FOAFers. Jim Ley‘s FOAFnaut is supposed to be such a tool for "browsing the FOAF universe".

I haven’t got it to work yet and, frankly, I’m wondering about the privacy implications and anti-spam protection.

Related posts on www.josschuurmans.com:

• ‘TypePadVersusWordPress’ on Wikispaces.org (September 19, 2005)
• Web 2.0 means participation, also in the mobile space (September 8, 2005)
• Submission to the Open Directory Project (ODP) (September 7, 2005)