My interest in social software has been growing recently. In point of fact, I’m not sure why. I’m truly not a very social person, and I basically have no friends (OK, I have few friends), but something about the networks possible in the social software web spaces intrigues me. Perhaps it has something to do with the sessions coming out of IT Conversations for MeshForum.

One of my current experiments in social software is tribe.net, and one of the tribes I belong to is the RSS tribe. I recently caught a post there regarding a service called RSSContact.com, wherein you essentially sign up and enter some contact information which is syndicated via an RSS feed. Folks (family, friends, and business contacts, essentially) then subscribe to that feed and any time your contact info changes they see an update.

An intriguing idea, I suppose, but given my recent attention to microformats, and specifically to hcard it seems like a duplication of effort. I’ll be filing a post in a few minutes that will replicate this functionality by creating a Contact category here and posting my hCard into that category. If I wanted to replicate the functionality of RSSContact, I would simply have folks subscribe to that category’s RSS feed and there you’ll have it. This won’t help folks who don’t have a category-aware blog with category-specific RSS feeds (or those who have no blog at all, for that matter, poor souls), but seemed a worthy exercise in broadening microformat relevance.

This brings to mind another problem and potential role for microformats to play in the overall simplification of interconnected life (O.S.I.L.). Why should I have to update my contact information in multiple places at all? If my contact info were to substantially change, right now I’d have to make changes in as few as 2-3 places (including sending an email to several dozen folks) to as many as several dozen (if, for example, my preferred email changed). Social software systems aren’t making this any easier - in fact they’re making it much harder; as many as 2/3 of the places I’d have to change my preferred email are social software sites.

How cool would it be if I could simply file my contact info in one place and give different individuals subsets of that information? Say, perhaps, that I want my family and close friends to be able to access everything including my home and work address, but online acquaintences and business contacts should only be able to see a smaller subset. Perhaps by passing in a parameter in the url to my hCard-enabled page I can output only the appropriate information for that particular individual. Even better, as more applications become RSS-aware, I can have my work email app subscribe to a feed of that page so that changes I make there are automatically effected on my work contact card, or my family’s cell-phone automatically update with my new cell number from the network. An essential feature of an effort like this would be to be able to have different profile available to different viewers, because I play different roles in my life (don’t we all?) and need to allow people contacting me in any particular role differing sets of contact info.

On a slightly related note, my next somewhat larger foray into microformats is likely to be a WordPress plug-in to help WordPress authors create an hCard that they can drop in to their templates. My initial thought for this was for it to basicaly output an hCard for use on a page like my Contact page, but as I plan it I’m thinking that an even more useful implementation would enable all the authors on a blog to enter their contact details, and to further enable the blog owner to place links to hCards (either locally hosted or remote) in the post-footer as a hyperlink from the author’s name. Perhaps a long and a short version available, the long version to be a hyperlink and the short version to simply contain the relevant hCard information. This project is well-along in the planning stage and I’ll probably start work on the actual implementation soon.