Human relations have the additional and curious property of changing the relationship through the act of labeling, and anyone who has ever said “I love you” can attest.

You see, you can’t just sit back and say “let’s not define X” just because it may change, or even if there is a guarantee that it will change. It should still be defined.

Social software presents users with a way to state that they have some relationship with someone. Some of the softwares even allow you to dinfe it in slightly more detail. We’re simply trying to stabdardize and flesh out those relationships. There will obviously be some point at which new relationship types aren’t added — you have to draw a line somewhere.

As for ambivalentOf, my friend (and collaborator) Morbus suggested it to define his relationship with some guy who will go unnamed but is heavy handed in the RSS world. I put it in there because hey, you’ve gotta have fun at what you do. And that was fun!

Interestingly enough this schema started a year and a half ago (or was it more? I forget) as a way for me to begin writing a simple (ha!) genealogy schema to replace FamilyML, a simple genealogy schema. And now look where it is!

Ian has written more about Clay’s writeup, with a bit more directed attention to the post itself.

We’ve been working on this update (in truth, Ian has done most of the work, I’ve mainly said things like “ooh. that looks good!). Some RDF problems have been fixed, we added many new terms, and all of the terms have nice URLS : http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/friendOf

Check it out, it’s quite nice!

Now don’t get me wrong — I did like the comment supprot in RSS 2.0, but I’m tired of implementing formats that are created in the span of a month. We need something that is VERY well thought out, and well implemented. RSS 2.0 was not it. But this might be.

Then again, sometimes a REST approach is perefectly fine.

OK, so that was a very open-ended opinion. Too bad. I think that REST, XML-RPC and SOAP all have their strngths and weaknesses and everyone should be able to use all of them, and know when to use them.