Having mentioned I wanted to implement proper hCard support on bragster.com, the opportunity arose much sooner than expected.
Having played with the mofo Ruby gem over a weekend, it became obvious we could implement not just hCards on our profiles (which is a very quick thing to do), but that we could follow Satisfaction's lead in letting people import their hCard-supporting profiles when they sign up at bragster. So we did.
We just deployed the code to our live site this morning, so new users on bragster can now click the logo of the site they have a profile on already (places like flickr, twitter, last.fm), or the microformats logo to enter the full URL to any page that has their hCard on it, and it'll pre-fill the sign-up form with as much data as we can use. Depending on the profile you're importing and how much of it you filled out, it can pre-fill your username, first and last names, and which country you're from.
This will hopefully be a first step and we can later add more features like subscribing to your hCard to get auto-updates to your profile; finding which of your friends are already on the site via XFN and more. Along with stuff like OAuth, hopefully we'll be able to move away from asking for users' passwords for other services (e.g. Gmail) just to help them move their data with them.
That's excellent - brilliant implementation, I can't wait for this sort of thing to be more commonplace. Well done for hopefully kick starting a revolution in the way websites use microformat data.
This is the first example of microformats I've seen that is actually useful to the average person, and not just us web designing nerds!
Thanks Rich, and apologies for not noticing your comment in the moderation queue until now!
[...] hCards come to bragster.com This is a re-post of an article on my personal blog. [...]