tombot // notes by thomas marban

so after releasing pulse (and a quite boring pre 2.0 era), plaxo is making another smart move with their online identity consolidator in hope of bringing together the scattered profile pages everyone’s fostering these days (scoble has the video). basically, it’s just a python script that crawls web sites for xfn tags and reports back the verified claims. the good samaritans offer it as a free download and encourage every profile-building service to make use of it.
while this is a another small step on the long road to social network portability the major flaw with all this stuff is still the enormous perception threshold for the average user. microformats, which have been around for a long time now still lack in doing their homework and getting the word out to the masses (well, except for one book and some cookies). seriously, hcard support via bookmarklet and extension hacks; hcal, ical, webcal - who really cares? openid on the other hand seems to undergo a bit faster adoption but while the do-gooders fight to ensure our future online identity, msft is saddling its own horse.