If you'd like to tweak the results for your profile - or hide your profile completely - you can always log in using your Twitter credentials or your FriendFeed key.

Oh great. Yet another profile to complete? Not exactly. Thanks to SocialWhois' "voodoo" button. One click and you're likely to have your profile pre-populated with relevant information from your profiles across the Web.

This Isn't a Popularity Contest

One of the things that makes SocialWhois so appealing isn't what it is, but rather what it isn't. It isn't a popularity contest. It's a search for relevance:

"SocialWhois is about everything but popularity. You'll think that it's hypocrisy or irony, but I (SocialWhois' creator) am not popular on SocialWhois! And guess what, I like it that way! Really :) In fact, on SocialWhois, no one is popular.... You can navigate in the graph and discover new faces, and the way this graph is being traversed is different for everyone of us."

With the tagging functionality, you're more likely to find that user who shares similar interests with you. And in so doing, you're likely to have more engaging conversations.

It Just Works

One of the things we've always loved about whois is the fact that it just works. There are any number of services that allow you to look at the data held by the registrars, all of which have varying levels of usability and clutter. But by and large, we run whois lookups because they serve a specific purpose.

SocialWhois has a lot of that same appeal. Simple, straightforward, and it provides the information you're seeking. It will be interesting to add this to the collection of tools we use to find - and better understand - those around us on the social web.

hCard: Providing Your Contact Information

Users are tired of repeatedly entering profile information over and over again. This problem is solved by the microformat hCard. Leslie Chicoine, an Experience Designer at Get Satisfaction, talked about how her company had created a sign up process for their web application using hCard. (see screen shot below)

XFN & FOAF: Who are your contacts

Another microformat, XFN, and the FOAF project are techniques for embedding relationships in links. This allows social networks to recommend contacts that should be shared, without scraping web based email clients. Recently, Google introduced a Social Graph API, which "index[es] the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections".

Something very interesting that I wasn't aware of until today's panel was that both Plaxo & Six Apart were working on something similar before Google announced OpenSocial, according to Joe Smarr and David Recordon. However, once Google started focusing on this they were happy to hand it over to them - because Google "has the web on a hard drive", so it makes the crawling component of this far less difficult. For a good overview on Google's Social Graph API, check out the following introductory video:

OpenID: Authenticating Individuals

OpenID is a decentralized framework for allowing social networks (and other web applications) to authenticate users. In other words, it lets users login using shared credentials across different services. It also allows individuals to decide what information they want to share with each application. For example, a user might decide not to provide their postal or email address.

OAuth: Authorizing Access

The final protocol discussed was OAuth. It is a protocol that is less about authentication (OpenID) and more about authorization. The protocol has been developed over the last year. The specification was released in December 2007 and modeled off a number of authorization protocols, including the Flickr Authorization protocol. According to Chris Messina, a number of services have already started using it including:

• Fireeagle
• Open Social
• Pownce
• Get Satisfcation, and
• Magnolia
• (and Twitter support will be coming soon)

Chris also pointed to a comment in a recent post of ours about email passwords, that highlighted the need for tools like these. Also there was a comment on RWW from Oren Michels at Mashery, indicating it is the most requested feature for them right now.

Conclusion

Securely moving your data around the web has increasingly become an important concept on the web. Arguably, it was the most discussed meme at this year's SXSW. While not an application, you could say it has been 'this year's Twitter'.

The Data Portability group deserves credit for educating the market. Beyond that, it is also an idea whose time has clearly come. It is interesting to think what applications will be built on top of these portability standards - they might be popular by next year's SXSW!