[crazysmoove]

One of the big things to come out of the semantic web was RFD-A (embedding semantics in unstructured web pages) and similar technologies (microformats, JSON-LD, schema.org). It's what lets Google show product reviews and rankings in search results, and lets shopping aggregator sites show things like price comparisons from other websites. While it's probably not as widespread as its boosters from a decade ago hoped it would be, it did lead to some helpful technologies that are in widespread use now.

I wonder if Facebook won't someday be forced to publish its social graph data in FOAF format the same way Microsoft was forced to publish its Office document specs as part of an anti-trust decision.

Speaking of Facebook, the OpenGraph tags are another example of widely-used semantic data on the web, maybe the most widely-used, since all kinds of sites pull in page summaries, images, and other data from those tags. So while Facebook doesn't make social network data available, it did popularize a format for sharing other types of data (about companies, articles, websites, etc.).

[crazysmoove]

Sorry, that should be "RDF-A," not "RFD-A."