Looking at human.json

Back in the mystical early 2000s, the world was introduced to the idea of FOAF, or Friend of a Friend. I always pronounced it like LOAF, but that could have been wrong. The perils of only having read something. But I digress. FOAF was a machine-readable RDF schema that let you define your “social graph”, aka the people in your life with whom you have connections. Think family, friends, partners, colleagues, idols, and the like. You would publish your FOAF linking to people, they would publish theirs with links back to you, and presto, the Semantic Web would take care of the rest. It was open, distributed, and not beholden to any one social network or site. Being XML, FOAF was also infinitely flexible. You could define links to other profiles, details about your interests, the area where you live, and whatever contact information you felt comfortable sharing. Want to encode something else? No worries, just import a new namespace. The FOAF specification is still online at the time of…