hCard is one of the two main microformats that one sees mentioned (the other being hCalendar). There was an interesting discussion on it in the second Talkcrunch podcast. Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn.com was asked why they did not support hCard. He made the simple point that they only implement features on the site which give near-immediate benefit to their users. hCard, like many of the microformats is in the chicken and egg situation where it needs someone to take a leap of faith, build some unique applications around hCard and the other microformats and then push that to seed the creation and use of microformatted data.

Our belief that microformats could underpin a whole new breed of applications and services grows stronger by the day. With the right funding, a startup could really drive the adoption of microformats, particularly on non-traditional end-user platforms. By using open straightforward standards, they could usurp many of the current walled-garden approaches, to the benefit of both end-users and themselves.

As I am discussing hCard, I should point out that I’ve updated the Argolon contact page to hCard format. This can be done very easily by anyone over at the microformats web-site. There is a link on the contact page allowing you to simply save off the contact details as a VCF file which Outlook etc can easily import.

[tags]microformats, hCard,hCalendar,Techcrunch,Talkcrunch, LinkedIn[/tags]