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Up until today only a few technologies supported certain standards, the Operator extension for Firefox supports microformats, as will Firefox 3 when it is released, but none of these are big enough or important enough for the mainstream. Adding semantics to a website is a lot of hard work if no-one is around to use it.

This is why Yahoo!’s announcement is so big. Now there are machines reading that data and using it and enriching the web with it, do you, as a developer or site owner, want to miss out on that? Yahoo!’s search is to use microformats initially, to improve their understanding of the data to return more relevant results (and, from the looks of their example with LinkedIn add more detail to their search results). So, will other search engines, I’m looking at Google and Microsoft here, want to miss out on the wealth of data that they aren’t collecting and Yahoo! is?

What could be better, a reason to include semantic technologies in your site, better search results, new, intelligent services? I can only say thank you to Yahoo! for supporting this and giving it the much needed boost.

At Mahalo we just rolled out rolled out Microformats for relevant search result pages. So what does this mean, and what are Microformats? Well, they are data classes that help machines and people identify and export information. Data such as contacts and address information is much easier to manage, search engines can also better catalog the info. Yes a little bit of the semantic web of tomorrow….today!

XRDS-Simple provides a format and workflow for the discovery of resources metadata, and other linked resources. As web services continue to grow, applications utilize a wider range of web services and resources across multiple providers. XRDS-Simple allows providers to document their resources in a machine-readable way, which can be automatically discovered by consumer applications.

Despite the valid concerns that some have with Google’s Social Graph API, I thought I would talk about the technical possibilities. My social graph may be of particular interest becuase I had used my Wordpress blog’s XFN feature to mark up the blogs I read as “muse” and my profile on at least 10 social networks as “me.” Using the Google’s Social Graph API demo you can see my extensive list of FOAF and XFN URLs. There is also a machine readable format that could be fed into a new social network to find friends on that network. (click for a larger version)