MT FOAF Friends of Friends.
 Ben Trott is implementing a way for Moveable Type bloggers to securely connect to other 'friends'. It implements a FOAF (Friend of a Friend) scheme - which goes out and fetches a name, email and homepage URL and stocks it into a cookie. Then all sorts of new ways for blogs to communicate between each other automatically can be facilitated. This is sort of like - 'lite-weight' digital identity and shows that we're starting to go beyond just plan 'linking' to each other.
Of course having true identity servers is the ideal, but let's just hope that this journey to identity is not over, but just beginning.
Persistent digital ID's is a foundation building block needed for social networking and what I call 'the mesh'. Ben is starting to implement FOAF as a way for Moveable Type end-users to figure out who's commenting, linking and is part of one's inner social network. Once that 'inner group' has been ascertained, THEN it's time to do cool, new things with 'these people', their comments and other constants that are embedded in their blogs.
The most exciting thing is what comes out of all this.
Connecting people together (like Ryze and xxx) is one of the elements of infrastructure we need to build new kinds of on-line communities. Knowing who your friends, family and colleagues 'are' - come sright after knowing who YOU are!
Hopefully the FOAF API Ben is implementing will evolve to support open standard that others can build on top of and continue the spread of 'the mesh.
(Thanks to Jonathan Peterson for the pointer) [Marc's Voice]
7:43:26 AM 
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