What are microformats?
According to microformats.org they are “designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards”.

So what does that really mean?
Microformats are embedded in web pages using bits of xhtml to represent things like people, tags or events. Microformats support feeds and APIs for your website in the fastest and simplest way. And they also help provide a way to publish reliable information on the Web.

So what do these bits of code look like?
Technorati uses the RelTag to tag it’s blogs RSS feeds, the code looks something like this:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]" rel="tag">[tagname]</a>

You can find out more about Technorati tags here.

So what does this have to do with Social Networking?
Meet XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) the microformat that puts the ‘human face’ on linking. Huh? Ok, let’s say I’m friends with KB and I also worked with her, my link to her would read like this:

<a href="http://kgbfiles.blogspot.com/" rel="friend co-worker">KB</a>

Now she could also link to me the same way then others can see how we are connected, make sense? Here are other tags that can be used:

acquaintance: Someone who you have exchanged greetings with
contact: Someone you know how to get in touch with
met: Someone who you have actually met in person
colleague: Someone in the same field of work/study
muse: Someone who brings you inspiration
sweetheart: Someone close to you
crush: Someone you have a crush on

So why do people do it?
I think the point of XFN is help connect your contacts across multiple networks. Doesn’t it drive you crazy every time you join a new network and you have to fill out your profile and then invite all your friends to join? XFN makes it easy by making your information portable. Plaxo says it best, “we believe strongly that users should have ownership, control, and portability of their profiles and friends list. No service you use should claim your data as their own and keep it trapped in their “walled garden”.” Nicely put. Although not all Social Networks are XFN friendly it is predicted to become the norm of the semantic web and not just for Geeks.

If you want more information on XFN check out these sites and articles:
Xhtml friendly network
XFN, relationship minefield
XFN for n00bs
Building a open Social Graph

West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers have also developed a clever way to market on-line with Cheddar Vision. 24 hours a day you can watch the cheddar age! Sound completely boring? Well Cheddar Vision has quite the following, with groups on FaceBook and MySpace this cheddar is getting a lot of coverage! It has even been rumored that the cheddar was invited to a wedding…

Another effective marketing method is using on-line social networks to distribute an ad like this one. It has made it’s way around YouTube, reddit and Digg.

Some content, especially humorous content, has incredible potential to take advantage of viral marketing using on-line social networks and blogs. Isotope Communications is responsible for the marketing on Cheddar Vision and hopefully we will never find out who is responsible for the writings for the Fake Steve Jobs’ blog but I think these are very innovated and effective methods to marketing on-line.

So here are some of the trends I can think of:

Letter spacing. CSS allows us to manage letter spacing so we are seeing lots of uppercase titles with extended letter spacing (much like the menu on this site).

San serif fonts. San serif fonts like ‘Times New Roman’ and ‘Georgia’ seem to be making a come back, especially for titles. Jeffrey Zeldman does a wonderful job of this on the A list Apart website. He has also done it in the redesign of his studio Happy Cog, but has taken it one step further with uppercase italic!

Fluid layouts. This trend I can see sticking around for the long haul. As much as we would like to think that we as web designers know how people view the web we can’t always be sure. Optimizing for the 1024px resolution with a fluid layout will allow our designs to stay consistent on most browsers. Check out Jakob Nielson’s article on screen resolutions.

Color trends. As video cards improve the requirement of web safe colors is fading. Miles Burke has put together something he calls Web 2.0 Secret Weapon where he has put together 70 of the most popular Web 2.0 colors.

Rounded corners. It seems that along with increased use of CSS came the rounded corners. This is a softer look for the web and is also a nice and clean way to display blocks of information.

3 column layouts. Since monitors are getting larger we have more real estate to work with and if you use a number like 960px it makes a nice 3 column grid. I believe one of the driving forces behind the three column layout is the proliferation of blogs.

Blocky logos and icons. FireFox and 37 Signals do a great job using icons to enrich their web interfaces. And logos such as Flickr and Technorati have a blocky clean look because of the fonts used in them. Have a look at Stephen Coles’ article on the fonts used in a few of these favorite brands.

Funky domains. I know this is not really a design trend but I think it is worth noting as a branding trend. Funky domains like del.icio.us look awesome but
as Miles Burke mentions in another article cra.zydomai.ns, this new
trend makes it more difficult to remember domain names…where do you put
the period? And trying all the different combinations will take you to
other sites if you don’t register them all yourself…

A few things to watch for in future; someone has finally come up with a way to use your favorite fonts on the web. sIFR 2.0 uses flash to replace blocks of text or titles with the font of your choice, the code is open source and uses javascript, CSS and flash. Unlike strictly image based text, the developers Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben claim this technique is fully accessible to screenreaders and other assistive technology.

And watch for increased screen resolutions – Jakob Nielsen predicts “Within the next 10 years, I expect monitors of, say, 5000×3000 to be in fairly common use, at least among high-end business professionals”. That is going to drastically change the way we design websites and web applications.

Trends change all the time and these are just a few that I’ve been noticing. I’m excited to see what the future holds as we move into the world of Web 3.0 – the Semantic Web.