vCard + RSS as an alternative to social media
Translations: brLast year after talking for a while with someone during a conference they asked me for my LinkedIn to be able to connect with me, to which I answered I didn't have one.
It was many years ago when I decided to leave social media. I don't miss it. Instant messaging allows me to keep in touch with the people that really matter to me in a much more personal way.
Still, this interaction stayed in the back of my mind. It would indeed be nice to keep track of these connections too. The people you had an interesting conversation with for just a few minutes. To be able to check how they're doing every now and then, who they're working for and what they're hacking on.
Essentially I would like for everyone to have an online profile and feed, which I could easily check and subscribe to, and that this subscription data could be stored locally. Why should that be exclusive to social media?
It's not. In fact, the feed part has already been solved for quite a long time with RSS/Atom. So by just having the URL for someone's RSS/Atom feed, you can add it to your feed reader and easily follow the person's updates wherever they're published to.
The profile part, a place with the key points about a person's current status (name, photo, location, employer, etc), is the one that has historically been tied to social media. Personal websites do many times have an "about" page with such information, but I find the lack of structure makes it way less useful than a social media's profile.
However, there's actually a widely used open standard for encoding profiles as well: vCard. It's mainly known as the format used on email clients to store contacts, where they're even synchronized between server and clients using the CardDAV protocol. But vCards are also used for contacts in your phone: it's possible to import and export contacts on iOS and Android using vCards.
So that's when I realized, if there's a widely used open standard for feeds, and another for profiles, why not join the two? By embedding an RSS/Atom feed URL in a vCard, it becomes a single file that has all the information needed to identify a person and follow their updates. Since it's a single file, it's easy to share it with others as well as store the vCards for all your connections locally.
Now one interesting bit is that though the profile information on the vCard
might get outdated, there is actually a SOURCE property which is meant to
contain the URL where the latest version of the vCard can be retrieved. So by
hosting your vCard in a public URL, say your personal website, it's possible for
people that have already downloaded it to keep it up to date.
As for how the feed URL can be encoded in the vCard, after skimming over
the latest version of the spec, I originally intended to have it as a plain
URL property. But I wanted the main URL in the vCard to still be the
person's website, so some mechanism would be needed to differentiate between the
two URLs. At first I thought of using a MEDIATYPE parameter in the URL,
but the spec explicitly said that for protocols such as HTTP the
Content-type HTML header should be used instead. However, as it seems,
despite RSS/Atom feeds having standardized media types (application/rss+xml
and application/atom+xml respectively), in practice, text/xml is used
instead. In the end, this means that in order to tell that an URL in the vCard
is for an RSS/Atom feed, the URL would need to be fetched and read. To avoid
that complication, I decided, reluctantly, to use a non-standard property
instead, X-FEED, for the feed.
Trying it out
In order to try the idea out, I created this repository with a couple simple
scripts. First there's a vcard-render script that parses vCards and renders
them using a provided jinja template. The idea is that you can use it to render
your vCard and your connections' vCards in your website for example, which is
exactly what I use it for in this page I've added to the website (it can be
found from the About page). If you're curious as to how I integrated the script
into my website, see this commit.
The other script is vcard-to-opml which extracts the RSS feed from the
vCards supplied and generates an OPML file with them, which can then be imported
into a feed reader. The idea here is to run this script on the vCards of all the
people you have downloaded (your connections) so you can easily follow their
feeds. I use newsboat as my feed reader, so I would add the following command
to a crontab to run it periodically (as soon as I get some real connections!):
newsboat -i <(awk 1 ~/ark/etc/dav/contacts/5DEB-65D21680-2F1-4AEA3480/* | ./vcard-to-opml.py)
Note: awk is used here instead of a simple cat because apparently those
vCards don't have a newline at the end of the file. I'm not sure if it's my
email provider's fault, where I store my vCards, or vdirsyncer's fault, which
is the program I use to have a local copy of my vCards.
Conclusion
If you're interested in trying out using vCards and RSS to connect to people as well, check out the repository that contains those scripts. And feel free to reach out if you do so, you can find my email on... you guessed it, my vCard 😉.
Even if no one ever uses this, at least I now have a proper answer for the next person that asks for my LinkedIn. "Just scan this QR code and you'll see my profile" 🙂.
