Re: [VCARDDAV] contact format coordination - next steps

We added the following singular fields from OpenSocial:

aboutMe, bodyType, currentLocation, drinker, ethnicity, fashion,
happiestWhen, humor, livingArrangement, lookingFor, profileSong,
profileVideo, relationshipStatus, religion, romance, scaredOf,
sexualOrientation, smoker, and status

and the following plural fields:

activities, books, cars, children, food, heroes, interests, jobInterests,
languages, languagesSpoken, movies, music, pets, politicalViews, quotes,
sports, turnOffs, turnOns, and tvShows.

The spec authors of OpenSocial researched and documented all the major
social networks at the time, and these were the fields that they decided
were common enough to merit a "canonical field name". Of course, some are
more common and useful than others, but the thinking is: the cost to
specifying a field name is very low (if you don't need it, don't use it),
but the cost to not agreeing on a field that many sites want to expose is
high (they probably will each invent a non-compatible field name), so it's
better to err on the side of saying "*if* you want to represent this field,
here's the agreed-upon way to do it", which is the approach we've taken in
general with PoCo, which seems to have worked out well. It also defends
against the "oh, looks like this spec isn't for me because it doesn't
support fields X, Y, or Z that are common for my use case" problem, which I
worry vCard as currently proposed will face, at least in the broader social
web space.

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 5:31 PM, Renato Iannella <renato@iannella.it> wrote:

> On 9 Sep 2010, at 05:08, Joseph Smarr wrote:
>
>  For instance, compare the representations of gender in Portable Contacts
>> and the proposed vCard XML:
>>
>> <gender>male</gender>
>> vs.
>> <sex><integer>1</integer></sex>
>>
>> I think it's hard to argue that the first version (PoCo) is far more
>> readable and semantically clear.
>>
>
> I agree strongly here - which I have posted in the past [1] [2]
> We must provide *easy and non-verbose* XML encodings.
>
>  I'm aware of, and vCard does not seem to have added many (if any) social
>> networking fields. Again, I worry that this will limit the
>> perceived applicability of vCard 4 to only traditional contact stores, and
>> misses the opportunity to make vCard the de facto standard for "people data"
>> more generally.
>>
>
> Can you give some examples of the types of new social networking fields
> that were added to PoCo?
>
> Do you mean the ones taken from OpenSocial? (eg tvShows, pets....) ?
>
>
>
>  Cheers...
> Renato Iannella
> Semantic Identity
> http://semanticidentity.com
> Mobile: +61 4 1313 2206
>
> [1] http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/vcarddav/current/msg01368.html
> [2] http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/vcarddav/current/msg01288.html
>
>