My XFN Graph

XFN Graph

[Geoff Holden](http://www.geoffholden.com/projects/xfngraph/) has created [XFN Graph](http://www.geoffholden.com/projects/xfngraph/), a Java based tool for creating visualization for XFN. Run the program, give it an URL, then it will spider the given web site for XFN links and provide you with a nice graph. You can instruct it to spider from one to four levels of XFN links. But in my case, it complained with an out of memory error when I chose more than one level :(. An odd error considering I have 1GB of memory, and it was nowhere near full.

[XFN](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Friends_Network) is an implementation of Internet based social networking, not unlike [Friendster](http://www.friendster.com) or [Yahoo! 360](http://360.yahoo.com). But unlike them, XFN is not confined to a specific web site, it is done in the World Wide Web itself. XFN is a [Microformat](http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/MicroFormat), which means it is built on top of XHTML.

[WordPress](http://www.wordpress.org), the blogging software behind this site, supports XFN out of the box. As XFN gains more widespread recognition, any WordPress (or any XFN enabled blog software) user should take advantage of XFN in blogrolls. When search engines begin to understand XFN, XFN in blogrolls will replace social networking web sites (Friendster, Orkut, etc), at least in my opinion.

14 comments

  1. In the “geek” level, yes. But since not everybody is “geeky” enough, social networking website are still here to stay. :)>-

  2. #1: yes, in the future when blogger supports XFN, so non geek users will be able to use XFN, just like when using wordpress :P

    #6: max memory di komputer saya, dan saya gak pakai ulimit, kalau ada limit mungkin di-hardcode di programnya :(

    #7: coba lihat http://gmpg.org/xfn/

  3. priyadi, di java kamu bisa pass parameter buat allocate memory ke applicationnya.

    di source code nya ngga ada memory limiter kok. saya barusan dicompile dan baca source code nya.

  4. it complained with an out of memory error when I chose more than one level

    Your memory issue is probably because Java defaults to using a maximum of 64MB. If you edit the run.bat/run.sh file to add “-Xmx256m” to tell it to use up to 256MB, you should be able to go deeper.

  5. hi,

    i’m a college student, and my project requires research on using XFN graph, but I’m having problems with it… can any experts help please? Reply to my email please….

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