Mining the Social Web

Summary

If you remember nothing else from this chapter, remember that microformats are a way of decorating markup to expose specific types of structured information such as recipes, contact information, and human relationships. Microformats have vast potential because they allow us to take existing content and make the data that’s in it explicit and conformant to a predictable standard. Expect to see significant growth and interest in microformats over the months ahead. You’ll also see amazing innovations based on HTML5’s microdata as HTML5 gains market share. If you find yourself with copious free time, be sure to check out Google’s Social Graph API. This is not to be confused with Facebook’s RDFa-based Open Graph protocol or the related Graph API that’s covered in Chapter 9, which includes an index of XFN, FOAF, and other publicly declared connections.