I&#x27;m old enough to remember being excited about FOAF too.<p>The idea came out of the world of blogs; if you have a blog, so the thinking went, you basically have an online identity endpoint. So if there was a simple way to describe relationships between those endpoints, you could write software to follow those relationships, and then... <i>voila!</i> A completely open social network.<p>The dream collided unpleasantly with reality in two places. First was the problem that running a blog implies a commitment to continual writing that most people are never going to make, so when your first step is &quot;set up a blog somewhere&quot; people think you&#x27;re asking them to make a huge commitment and run away. And second, FOAF was built on RDF; RDF makes my brain hurt just thinking about it, and I&#x27;m a professional nerd! (The refrain was always &quot;it doesn&#x27;t matter how complicated the format is, users will only interact with it via tools that make it simple.&quot; But every time I hear this about a format it reminds me of all the other formats I&#x27;ve heard that about in the past, all of which are deader than doornails now.)