more and more and more about merging data. this time it is called foaf: friend of a friend. another semantic web vapourware initiative. presented as a tool for social networking. i can't avoid it, for me that stuff has the flavor of a bad breath. even than when the developer tells me: yes, we are concerned about social and legal issues.

Sad to hear you find FOAF stinky because it shows up the ease of data-merging using modern tools (RDF/XML). We try to balance the creepy big-brother aspects by also showing ways of using PGP encryption and signing to improve the privacy and security of such applications. For eg. see http://usefulinc.com/foaf/encryptingFoafFiles

The way I think about this is as a warning of things to come. This kind of thing is as unstoppable and inevitable as Google's emergence from previous less
powerful search engines. If we know what's coming, we'll be ready for it.

On the plus side, it is also a celebration of connections and linking and decentralisation, not intrinsically stinky. If it shows anything, it is that privacy by obscurity is just plain dead: you can't have documents describing you scattered around the Web and rely on their scattered-ness to keep the data fragmented...

Quite how we deal with all this is another story.

DanBri