Earlier this month, our family welcomed our third child into the world—Mae Juliana Darowski. We’ve been adjusting to life with a now-larger-than-normal family, but you know me. This meant I also had some online profiles to update.

Because of my anal retentiveness, I like to fill in my “About Me” section of all of my online profiles with the same text. It’s all part of the “brand”. For the last 21 months, that text had been:

A daddy of two and a User Experience Designer for BatchBlue Software.

Yep, that’s pretty much me in a nutshell, sans the baseball geekdom.

My incredibly predictable updated short bio now reads:

A daddy of three and a User Experience Designer for BatchBlue Software.

One minor difference. The problem is, I needed to make this change EVERYWHERE. Specifically:

• Darowski.com meta info, sidebar, about page, etc.
• Twitter
• Last.fm
• Facebook
• Slideshare
• Brightkite
• Chi.mp
• Get Satisfaction
• DandyID
• Plurk
• Flickr
• Upcoming
• LinkedIn
• RINexus
• YouTube

There’s gotta be a better way, right? I ran into this same problem when I updated my profile photo. In a couple places, I was able to simply use my updated Gravatar. That’s the holy grail right there. If you don’t know what Gravatar is, it is a service that provides “globally recognizable avatars”. Basically, you update your image. Other services, instead of asking you to upload a photo, just use your email address to fetch your image. They pull whatever size image they need. If you update your Gravatar, those sites update your image. Everyone is happy.

Many blogs use Gravatar, but the social networking sites don’t. So, that’s the first problem—lack of widespread Gravatar use.

That led me to a desire for globally recognizable bios. Ideally, this could just be part of Gravatar. You provide two bios—a short one-liner and a more expanded bio. Kind of like what I have on my About page. That way, any time I update my globally recognizable bio, my online profiles get updated.

Who’s with me?

Joshua Porter posted a great article yesterday on Bokardo called “Sermo a sign of a larger trend toward specialized social networks“. In the post, Joshua says:

Sermo is a sign of a larger trend: the move to smaller, more specialized social networks that have custom tools to support a unique activity and may cater to a private or exclusive set of users. In this case it is sharing medical information among verified doctors.

I’ve blogged about Sermo in the past. I love what they are doing—creating an exclusive social network for physicians so that they can discuss medical issues long before they hit the journals (and are likely more candid than journals). Of course, they are raising a little hell as the pharmaceutical companies can no longer control their messages delivered to each physician. They are (gasp) talking to each other.

If it is possible to have a crush on a company, you know I’m in love with PatientsLikeMe. I left a comment about them on Josh’s blog, so I’ll just repeat myself:

On the other side of the medical spectrum, I’ve spoken with a few folks from Boston-based PatientsLikeMe, another example of a specialized social network. They are a network for the patients. I love that instead of Amazon’s “customers who bought this also bought this…” intelligence, they have “patients at the exact same stage of ALS as you who are experiencing these symptoms that you are have taken these medications and felt these side effects.”

Ridiculously amazing.

The market of “just because” social networks is now bloated. In order to take off you’re going to need one of these specialized networks that offers something nobody else can. One key to that can be taking detailed profile data and using it to help foster your users’ social interactions (like PatientsLikeMe, and others such as last.fm).

Damn, reading that back, it sounds good. You can tell I love this idea. I recently joined Facebook. I yawned about it here. All I’ve done with it is insert widgets into my profile of specialized networks I have elsewhere (last.fm, Flickr, Twitter) and add friends that I have elsewhere. I find Facebook doesn’t really do anything more than my personal blog already does—act as an aggregator for all this information.

So, these specialized networks—last.fm (for tracking my music listening habits), del.icio.us (for storing my bookmarks), Flickr (for storing my photos), Twitter (for microblogging, public IM, whatever the hell you wanna call it), etc.—offer a hell of a lot more value than the “aggregator” social networks. You can easily hop to another aggregator (or create your own) and add the specialized content to that new profile. You still need the specialized services, but the Facebooks and MySpaces become expendable.

Then there’s OpenID and portable social networks (via Oberkirch). Once these reach their enormous potential, what really is the purpose of Facebook or MySpace?

Well, there are two things I like about my name now—one for each name.

First name? Blogrolls.

One nice thing about having the name Adam is that you see yourself getting top billing (alphabetically, of course) on blogrolls. For example, here’s Jeremy Harrington’s:

And here’s the one at Providence Geeks:

Can’t complain about how that shakes out, huh?

Last name? Easy Googling

Now, I think it is great to have a unique name. I’m trying to carve out a name for myself in the web world and it sure comes in handy being named “Darowski” instead of, say, Jones. If you Google “Adam Darowski”, you pretty much get me. I’ve found a couple Adam Darowskis out there, but I’m sure they’re pissed at me for stealing their Google identity. Jim writes more about “Just Google my name” being the new business card.

So, there. I’ve come to accept my name—Polish jokes and all.

I have a “problem” named after me.

When I was chatting with Chris Messina a while back, he was telling me about how OpenID can solve the problems I brought up in my post hCard Overflow: Could We Use rel=hcard?. My homie Brian Oberkirch referenced that post in a recent post of his own titled OpenID, Portable Social Networks, and The Darowski Problem.

Darowski problem? WTF? That’s awesome!

I’m not sure what technically makes someone an “A-list” blogger, but to me, Oberkirch certainly is one. I gotta say, I’m honored to have the contact info overload problem be associated with me (a line I never thought I’d say when I was in design school). Then he emails me with a cryptic message that just says “Check it”, and a URL. He’s We’ve been picked up by ZDNet blogger Eric Norlin on a post called Brian Cracks the Identity and Web 2.0 Problem. After getting over the “Darwoski” spelling in Norlin’s piece, I’m pretty psyched. I literally have a problem.

So, back to OpenID. My god, this is needed. Read Brian’s article for a great summary of what the problem is and how OpenID will address it. Chris had told me to put OpenID on my to-do list for 2007 and Brian just gave me a bit more of a kick in the ass.

The first result of the 258 Oberkirchs is the Syndicate 2005 speaker list hCarded on Tantek’s site. This hit helps back up my two issues with overhCarding.

1. Incomplete Data

Brian, like all of us, has a lot of bits of contact information. Among them, he has a phone number. He has an email address. Heck, I’m sure he even has a mailing address. But none of them are included in the hCard on the Syndicate list. Should that data be included? Well, there’s really not much of a need for someone to care about the phone numbers and mailing addresses of every single speaker at a conference. But then, what’s the point of setting it in hCard if you aren’t collecting the person’s entire collection of contact information? There are likely some uses that I haven’t thought of, but the extraction example usually given for hCard is to convert to vCard and add the person to your address book. What good are vCards in your address book without proper contact information? But at the same time, what good is being inundated with contact information on a conference speakers list?

2. Data Evolves

The hCard downloaded from the Syndicate speaker list has Brian’s organization as “Weblogs Work” and his title as “host of the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog and CEO”. Well, Brian is no longer with Weblogs Work. He’s gone solo. And while he was the host of the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog, that is still hosted with Weblogs Work, with whom Brian is no longer associated. So, when someone changes jobs, email addresses, or phone numbers, all of this hCarded data on the web is then obsolete.

What to do?

A Solution?

I’m no Microformats expert, but I wanted to brainstorm a potential solution to go with this question I’m raising. The solution I came up with is:

rel-hcard

Rel-hcard would be very similar to rel-tag, rel-nofollow, or rel-license in that it is simply an attribute of a URL. Rel-hcard would allow developers to link an appearance of a person’s name on a web page to his/her own personal hCard on his/her own site. This way, if the person’s contact information changes, the site always links to the most recent information. Also, you don’t have to provide information about that person that really isn’t needed on that page. You can simply list the name and a link to that person’s hCard.

On the Syndicate 2005 speaker page, each speaker is marked up as a row in a three column table. The first column contains the speaker’s name linked to the speaker’s bio on the Syndicate site. The second column contains the speaker’s title and the third contains the speaker’s organization. Like so:

<tr class="vcard"><td><a class="linkType fn url" xhref="http://www.syndicateconference.com/live/38/events/
38SFO05A/conference/bio//CMONYA00BEAU">Brian Oberkirch</a></td><td class="title">host of the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog and CEO</td><td class="org">Weblogs Work</td></tr>

So, one flaw that I see with my approach is that it requires a separate link. So, since Brian’s name is already linked to his bio page on the Syndicate site, we can’t link to his hCard with his name. I can think of a couple of ways around this.

The first involves creating a second link that we then hide with CSS (using {display: none}). Like so:

<tr class="vcard"><td><a class="linkType fn url" xhref="http://www.syndicateconference.com/live/38/events/
38SFO05A/conference/bio//CMONYA00BEAU">Brian Oberkirch</a><a class="contactinfo" rel="hcard">(Contact Info)</a></td><td>host of the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog and CEO</td><td>Weblogs Work</td></tr>

You’ll notice a couple of things. First, I stripped out the class names for the title and organization. That’s because if we’re using a rel-hcard, there would be no need to mark up this information. The HTML would basically be a timestamp of the person’s contact information at the time it was published. The current, up to date hCard would provide the most recent contact information in the correct hCard markup.

You will also notice the second link in the first column (Contact Info). It is given the class “contactinfo”. That class can then be styled to display as none. So, is it bad that it’s still in the markup but not displayed on the page? Personally, I don’t think so. Those viewing unstyled content are probably not going to have Microformat parsers available to them. This way they can see that there is a link to the person’s complete contact information.

Alternately, the speaker table could be modified so that the speaker’s name is linked to contact information (with rel=”hcard”) and another column is added with that speaker’s sessions (and links to them). The title and organization columns could stay, though I wouldn’t mark them with “title” and “org” Microformat classes. I’d leave that to the hCard we’re linking to.

Does this make sense? Has this already been brought up in the Microformats community? Is there already a solution? This is similar to rel=”url” except that this would specifically tell parsers that the link contains an hCard. Perhaps this is encroaching on some of the work underway with OpenID, but this solution is one using pure Microformats.

Update: Brian Oberkirch has dubbed this “The Darowski Problem”.