Does anybody else out there use FOAF? If not, then you should seriously consider it.

FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) is a system of machine-readable pages for describing people and their connections. It is written in RDF (Resource Description Framework), a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web.

FOAF is open. Anyone can use it to describe himself or herself. You can describe yourself, your activities, your interests, your projects, and your relationships to other people.

FOAF is decentralized. You may create large social networks without the need for any centralized database.  You are able to connect to the web sites and services you like, without being cut off from friends who do not sign up with a specific social network choice (like FaceBook or MySpace).

And all of the public FOAF data on the web is already being indexed by search engines, including Google’s Social Graph.

For more information, go to the FOAF Project web site or read the specification.

I have a FOAF file at http://mikedaub.com/foaf on my personal web site. I list my email addresses (encoded with SHA1), my internet messaging accounts, my web sites, my OpenID‘s, my projects, my online accounts, some of my interests, and a few of my connections.

Feel free to link to me from your own FOAF file. Also, let me know when you do link to me, and I will be happy to return the favor. If you link to me, the information I prefer to have listed is:

<foaf:Person>
  <foaf:name>Mike Daub</foaf:name>
  <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>36ab1fc065a361956a53d67285fcf5129017ceea</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
  <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://mikedaub.com/" />
  <rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://mikedaub.com/foaf" />
</foaf:Person>

Now, if you have not done so already, go FOAF yourself.