Welcome

Some three years ago, Google introduced the concept of “nofollow” rel attributes on links. The idea was to try to handle the huge problems with link spam that plagued, and still plague, blogs and any other site allowing users to post comments with links. The “nofollow” attribute on links would indicate to search engines that the link should not be followed and subsequently would not have any influence on the target URL’s search ranking. The idea was that comment spam would decrease, as the incentive to spam would be smaller. Lots of blog platforms and other sites introduced “nofollow” attributes on any links provided by the visitors, in an attempt to fight spam.

About the same time as Google was trying to convince everyone to adopt the “nofollow” convention, Tantek Çelik introduced the concept of microformats and XHTML Friends Network (XFN). XFN uses the same “rel” attribute as is used by “nofollow”, but for a completely different purpose: to indicate the relationship with the target URL, e.g. saying that this is me on another site or this is a friend of mine. The idea was to use the hyperlinks already available to indicate relationships between people. A URL was no longer just a website, it was a person.

Earlier this year Google released the Social Graph API to developers. The idea was simple: more and more sites were using XFN and FOAF (a similar technology) to indicate relationships between URLs, and Google was already crawling these sites, so why not expose the information via an API? Using the Social Graph API you can see which URLs are connected, and how. Enter the address of someone’s blog or Twitter profile page, and you could see other URLs connected to this user, such as their Last.fm profile or LinkedIn CV.

That “rel” attribute on hyperlinks turned out to be quite useful—both fighting spam and linking people together. However, it’s now getting quite clear that the two can’t coexist: either you fight spam or you build a social graph, you don’t do both.

Twitter has recently had quite a bit of problems with spam, i.e. accounts being created only to push ads and links to other people. They even recruited a dedicated “spam marshal”, but they have also added “nofollow” to their outgoing links. This includes the link in a user’s actual Twitter profile. They are also a cool web 2.0 company, so they have adopted microformats. This means that the link in the profile is a “me”-link, i.e. indicating that the URL it’s pointing to is the same person as the Twitter account. That all very well, but the only problem is that the “nofollow” link voids the “me” link. Using Google’s Social Graph API there’s now no way of linking my Twitter account to my blog, or whatever URL I’m linking to.

With Google pushing hard to get people to adopt the “nofollow” convention, more social sites will add it, thus making XFN more or less impossible to use. The irony of course being Google promoting the Social Graph API, while at the same time slowly killing it by pushing the “nofollow” links…

The coffee machine crashed…

Originally uploaded by ksoderstrom

The coffee machine crashed…

When the volume knob won’t do the trick

Originally uploaded by ksoderstrom