Lately I've been tussling with the concept of user identification online. We've seen the rise of Friendster and other social networking sites and how it affects people (people find old friends and such).

I sometimes wonder why there isn't a centralized "yellow book" directory with all up-to-date contact information for anyone who wants to add information.

I guess it would build upon the FOAF idea more than anything ... but imagine if there was a central website where you input your name, your address, phone, e-mail, website, AIM, MSN, etc... and this is the _one_ place you keep all your information up-to-date. You would give your identification to your friends, and this central location would be where you keep your contact info updated; if you moved, you would simply update it here once.

The advantages of this are manyfold; if you build the proper API system and document the data format (XML), people can build third-party software to access the data and build apps off of it. You would also not need to keep notifying your friends whenever your e-mail changed; you would simply update it once on the site, which would then send the data out to all your "friends" (which you've specified on the site).

Imagine building a plug-in to some e-mail program; you write your friend's name in the TO: field, and it automatically accesses the central site and grabs the e-mail address, even if your friend has changed his or her e-mail in the past 24 hours.

I'm guessing this data would be useful on a lot of levels; a lot of companies and projects revolve around getting that metadata involving people into one area and then doing something with it.

Of course, the obvious downfall to this is spamming. People will that much access to data ... it's bound to be abused. So I'm guessing the best thing to do would be to only give your personal data out to people you've specified as 'friends' within your system.

More than anything, it's Friendster without the dating crap involved. It's just a method of keeping in touch with friends as well as managing their contacts.

Food for thought.

Edit: 2 minutes later:
I'm thinking one could actually use the FOAF spec to develop a centralized site for keeping all that data ... hrrrrmm. Maybe I'll think about it some more and develop it for fun later. :D

Edit again:
While searching for more FOAF material, I found out you can embed RDF data into JPEG images ... this is gonna be huge if I implement that for Tokki. (Link)

I think as soon as I get done with CE, I'm going to start messing around with FOAF in Tabulas (actually make use of that profile page).