microformats

Why is it that every single social network community site makes you:

• re-enter all your personal profile info (name, email, birthday, URL etc.)?
• re-add all your friends?

In addition, why do you have to:

• re-turn off notifications?
• re-specify privacy preferences?
• re-block negative people?

AKA "social network fatigue problem" and "social network update/maintenance problem".

I love the mockup.

Actually, the first issue I have is that it's called a weblog API....it's a CMS API, or maybe just a publish-editing API. We're stuck in this concept of "blog". With structured blogging (yep, that damn word again...but I guess that's what you get when all you have is one big text blob to shove data structures into*) just on the horizon, tools like ecto, Qumana, and MarsEdit are going to be pushed to work with the myriad number of web apps out there, and the different ways they've implemented some of the loose aspects of these APIs.

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Why the rant about blogging and "big text blobs"? Well, I'm biased by my tool of choice, Drupal. We've got separate content types for structured information, like events or reviews, and so don't need to take a step back and find ways to mark up structured information inside text. Of course, we'll support structured blogging standards and formats as they arise (and yes, those funky XHTML level microformats, too). Canter's Law, and all that.

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Heck, if those large players want to come along and crawl my standard RSS 2.0 categories, they can win by giving us kick ass interfaces and great tools for slicing and dicing. But I'm not going to work with your made up formats, I'm going to work towards global standards that work for everyone.