Are people using microformats?
I don’t mean “implementing.” Yahoo’s support for microformat implementation has been widely known for a while. However, I don’t consider an implementation to be “usage.”
Usage is people taking pages that contain microformats and doing something with them: importing hCards to their contacts software, pulling an hCalendar event out of concert listings to add to a personal schedule, leveraging hReview to find new restaurant reviews from atypical sources… does this happen?
I ask because I find it odd that there is so much passion from the Microformats community (even Bill Gates expressed enthusiasm last year at Mix ‘06), yet I do not experience any noticible benefits. Anyone having experiences to the contrary?
For the record, I fully subscribe to the dream that microformats enable. However, the overwhelming devotion in favor of implementing microformats seems unjustified based on the benefit to the end-users (power users and average users alike). Even hardcore techies don’t seem to be benefiting from (ie using) the existing implementations of microformats. It’s remarkable that a technology with so little benefit to the end-user today can generate continued excitement.
Pat answer: Seen the platypus? Innovation/evolution is rife with dead ends. You could do Mad Libs with your closing ‘graph and swap in any of the following: Solar Power in the 80s, Virtually Any Early-Stage Biotech Company, Cold Fusion, High Energy Physics, and on and on…
Not so pat answer: Evangelism for this product is necessary because like a similar virtual “product” tagging, its commercial potential is not viable until /after/ it achieves significant adoption, at least in the bleeding-edge community. While tagging was/is the ultimate FNAC for many web-pundit types, the question “Why did Yahoo buy Flickr not Photobucket?” is illustrative I think: one treats pixels as a commodity, the other as the foundation for a community, and tagging was essential to the realization of that vision. Bringing this next level of “connectedness” to the internet experience is worth evangelizing and pursuing, because this “feature” can be potentially leveraged to build Flickr2.0 (whatever that is), make the web easier/smarter/more fun to use, and get rich. And now on to the eternal VC question “But what’s the killer app?” :o)