I'm thinking you may be able to do that with the SocialGraph API using just OpenID, assuming they've enabled OpenID. I think it would be easier to just pull straight from the feed though. - Jesse Stay

I've been wondering that myself. I just added Atom feeds to our site, but I could only fit a URL to a profile in the author info. I'd rather have a richer profile that includes a name, profile location, public/linked twitter account etc. - Matt M (inactive)

I wonder if you could do this with Activity streams and Atom - Jesse Stay

If you come up with a good way to do this, I'll implement it for our stuff. - Matt M (inactive)

I need to look at the activity streams format and if this is part of that. If so, it should be supported in most Atom clients (the Atom clients would just need added support for Activity Streams) - Jesse Stay

Atom looks like you could support it easily enough without changes. The author element can have a URI attached to it. Just put the twitter/facebook/whatever URL and voila. - Otto

Otto, it would be nice to be able to attach multiple URLs - any idea if that's possible? - Jesse Stay

No, it is not possible without using extensions. http://tools.ietf.org/html... forbids multiple uri elements. You could define your own extensions though and put them in any Person type element (author, for example). <social:twitter> and <social:facebook> and similar come to mind. - Otto

Atom only allows one uri element, which kind of bites. - Matt M (inactive)

And unfortunately, sites like Twitter and Facebook put different things in that URI field. I don't think ActivityStreams covers this sort of thing. - Otto

The author element also support e-mail addresses. I wonder if there's a simple way to scrape various social networks based on the author's e-mail address and pull their info that way. - DAMMIT, MR. NOODLE

Curtiss, as I mentioned you could use OpenID and Google SocialGraph API to look up Twitter and Facebook info. It would still be easier if the author could provide this information ahead of time for you right in the RSS so you didn't have to make that additional lookup though. - Jesse Stay

I agree, Jesse, but the bottom line is that most authors aren't going to provide that information (mostly out of laziness, some out of ignorance and a very small percentage based on the fact that they don't want that info shared). Therefore, you'd probably end up with a lot of empty items in there. Add on top of that that network-specific tags inside of an RSS file or spec would obviously become dependent on the fact that those specific networks continue to exist, and you've got probably more hassle than it's worth. - DAMMIT, MR. NOODLE

I think more authors than you think would utilize that if developers made it available to them. It doesn't have to leave empty fields - nothing wrong with making the field optional. - Jesse Stay

We have that info available in our application (lots of users sign up via twitter or facebook). Exposing it in the atom feeds just makes sense. - Matt M (inactive)

Matt, agreed - I deal with a lot of similar apps that could easily make this available. It would not be that hard for Wordpress to make this a native field in their admin. (and you could create a plugin for it in the meantime) - Jesse Stay

Activity streams doesn't seem to deal with rich actor descriptions, do they? They are really just repurposed atom authors. - Matt M (inactive)

I've been storing the Facebook user ID as part of the metadata in the WordPress Simple Facebook Connect plugin. When a user makes a comment, or registers as a new user using Facebook Connect, or just connects their WP account to their FB account, then it stores an "fbuid" metadata field. Making this information (or similar) get put into the RSS/Atom feed would be relatively trivial. But I would want a defined standard somewhere to do it with, so that it would get used by people. - Otto

A draft to do this sort of thing in Atom is here: http://www.snellspace.com/wp... and http://tools.ietf.org/html... - Otto

This would definitely do the trick: http://tools.ietf.org/html... Too bad the draft is expired. - Otto

Otto, ditto. I don't think I'd want to put this in without a spec. - Matt M (inactive)

That draft spec (http://tools.ietf.org/html...) would do it like so: <pe:identity scheme="http://openid.net" href="http://example.org" /> <pe:identity scheme="http://facebook.com" href="http://facebook.com/example" /> <pe:identity scheme="http://twitter.com" href="http://twitter.com/example" /> - Otto

I added the person extensions to a test site I have for playing with my SFC plugin. Here's a couple of example feeds that contain Facebook identity links: http://ottodestruct.com/wptest... http://ottodestruct.com/wptest... - Otto