creating portable social networks with microformats

Microformats like hCard and XFN allow people to publish social network information like profiles and connections in HTML. This makes the data portable across sites and interoperable. Key points are: 1) hCard encodes things like names and profiles in HTML class attributes. XFN uses HTML link relations like "contact" and "me" to represent connections between people. 2) Many existing social networks already publish this kind of data, so microformats extract and structure existing information rather than requiring new behaviors. 3) Google's Social Graph API can parse microformats to allow importing profiles and connections from different sites and services into a single social network.