This is a very interesting idea - a formalized representation of contact information would help a lot in fighting the walled-garden effect of Facebook/etc.
Unfortunately, as currently implemented, this seems to be yet another centralized service that that is a single point of failure.
Would you consider taking a moment to write up a (draft) protocol first? Core features of the internet (representation of personal metadata could easily count a a "core feature") became popular because the protocol was there first in the RFCs for anybody to implement and interface with.
Link your RFC describing the protocol on the front page, and many people will jump on it. Without that, it's just a service that could fail. (I'll never understand why business choose to rely on services without first establishing a /second source/)
Admittedly, I was in something of a rush to throw it together, and altogether skipped that step. As you'd expect, the result was a bunch of second guessing, and false starts.
That said, I'm absolutely trending that direction, but I felt like there was enough that I didn't know that attempting a spec out of the gate would have led to a bad spec and a bad implementation, and the way that I've always worked, it's easier for me to spot errors in implementation that I don't catch in a design phase, which is frustrating for both me and some of the product managers I've worked with.
What I can tell you in the meantime is that the source, sloppy and unworked as it is, is currently available on Github @ github.com/bmelton/personable, and that some form of a specification is forthcoming, at least in a solid draft state.
The thing that's been really bugging me though is that, my best guess is that in order for it to work as I envision, it would have to be implemented as an oAuth provider (think oAuth, but with a bunch of extra_data fields) which, at least initially, felt very out of scope for the project, but is now starting to feel like more and more of a necessity in getting adoption rates greater than I'd expect to see from an altogether new thing.
I did, but I really see this as closer to 'finger'... perhaps even indistinguishable from it at this early stage. FOAF has been around awhile (tho obviously not as long as finger), and I've just never seen anybody use it, or was blind to it when I saw it.
I definitely see some kind of 'friend' association with Personable in the future, but it's not a social network, so I'm totally vague on how those associations might work.
Unfortunately, as currently implemented, this seems to be yet another centralized service that that is a single point of failure.
Would you consider taking a moment to write up a (draft) protocol first? Core features of the internet (representation of personal metadata could easily count a a "core feature") became popular because the protocol was there first in the RFCs for anybody to implement and interface with.
Link your RFC describing the protocol on the front page, and many people will jump on it. Without that, it's just a service that could fail. (I'll never understand why business choose to rely on services without first establishing a /second source/)