Boils down to, of the 18 XFN relationships, only rel-contact and rel-me is being used. For those of you that never heard of XFN, http://gmpg.org/xfn/intro http

Boils down to, of the 18 XFN relationships, only rel-contact and rel-me is being used. For those of you that never heard of XFN, http://gmpg.org/xfn/intro http://gmpg.org/xfn/intro, http://gmpg.org/xfn/11 http://gmpg.org/xfn/11 I'm not sure I entirely agree. On one hand, I agree with author that that at this stage, XFN needs to stick to simple, and just have rel-contact and rel-me will work for quite some time, as it gets adopted. However, on the other, I've always found social networks' descriptions of my relationships to people wanting, because it isn't binary. I don't want all my friends on facebook to see everything I do. Even with limited profiles, I resort to rejecting acquaintances. Rather than specific roles in the XFN relationships, like rel-sweetheart, or rel-colleague, it might be easier to specify a degree of intimacy rather than the actual role, because unless you're building a genelogy tree through XFN, I would venture to guess that when an application imports a contact list, it mainly cares who they are, and how intimate you are with them so it can set privacy measures correctly.