Not all people are my friends

David Weinberger's post on Many-to-Many about social networks -

...Real social networks are always implicit. The ones constructed explicitly are always — yes, always — infected with a heavy dose of social bullshit. It’s like thinking that the invitation list for your wedding actually reflects your circle of friends and relatives. No, you had to invite Barry-the-Boozer because he’s your cousin and you couldn’t invite Marsha because then you’d have to invite her husband Larry-the-Ass-Grabber and her daughter Erin-the-Snot-Flinger. Explicitly constructed social networks not only lack the differentiation that makes relationships real, they are falsehoods built to reinforce spectral relationships and to avoid ending shaky ones.

- has reminded me of a feature request I have for the otherwise perfectly lovely TypePad. It relates to the auto-creation of FOAF, described very recently by Anil Dash:

One of the "hidden" features of TypePad, which happens behind the scenes when you create a Friends TypeList, or blogroll, is that an XML Friend of a Friend (FOAF) file is created. FOAF lets you list the people you know, along with a description of yourself and how you know your acquaintances, so that people can search through these relationships. And now that thousands of these FOAF files have been built by TypePad, along with many more built manually by users of Movable Type and other tools, we're starting to see some of the first applications emerge around the nascent standard.

As far as I understand it - and I might be missing something - your FOAF file is generated when you create a People TypeList, not a Friends Typelist. And I don't believe you're given the opportunity to specify which TypeList describes your friends. So if I was to create a People TypeList that contained my wedding guestlist, then TypePad would generate a FOAF file saying that all of the invitees were known by me. But this isn't the case: I would certainly know of them all but I couldn't be said to know them.

The journey goes something like this:

Notice that switch in language from 'people' to 'friends'?

What I'd like is to be able to specify which TypeList described my friends (rather than my colleagues, or the people whose blogs I read regularly). And perhaps an additional (optional) field could be added to the Create a new TypeList step, which allows you to describe the relationship you have with the people you're about to list (e.g. Friend of, Colleague of, Has met, Fan of...). The people behind XFN have been giving some thought to this.

Alternatively, the One-Line Bio field one level down could be used to offer a richer description of your relationship (e.g. 'We used to meet once a week for a curry on Brick Lane but then I moved to Helsinki'), rather than grabbing the FOAF bio associated with that person.

It does make the process slightly more complicated but it also makes the outcome more meaningful.