The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do; it is a contribution to the linked information system known as the Web. FOAF defines an open, decentralized technology for connecting social Web sites, and the people they describe.
About FOAF
FOAF is about your place in the Web, and the Web's place in our world. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online.
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.
About the FOAF project
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project began early in 2000 as an "experimental linked information project", created by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller. It reached a wider audience thanks in particular to Edd Dumbill's writings, Leigh Dodds' foaf-a-matic, and the evangelism and creativity of a group of people too large to list here.
FOAF is a small but shapely piece of the wider Semantic Web project. You can learn more about the Semantic Web project at W3C.
About this site
The main Webmaster / sysadmin for the FOAF site (including Wiki, SVN, etc.) is Dan Brickley. You can mail webmaster@foaf-project.org or track him down through other means.
Acknowledgments: many many thanks to Nicole Sullivan for the original Web site design and implementation (including graphics, CSS, XHTML and everything); and also to Stéphane Corlosquet for explaining with infinite patience how to use Drupal, and for porting the original site to run in Drupal. The FOAF logo was contributed by the ever-creative Ian Davis. We also owe Edd Dumbill a huge thank-you for hosting our mailing lists. Last but not least, our 24x7 #FOAF IRC chatlogs are provided by Dave Beckett - thanks all and everyone! See also acknowledgements section of the FOAF specification.
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FOAF is part of a shift towards a Web where we can choose the sites and tools we like, without being cut off from friends who made different choices. FOAF lets you share and inter-connect information from diverse sources, move it around, and use it in unexpected new ways.
Community
Most FOAF project discussion is on the foaf-dev mailing list.
See the list homepage for details, archives and subscription information. The list is open and public.
We also have an IRC channel #foaf on the irc.freenode.net Internet Relay Chat server. Public logs are available.
Other mailing lists for special projects are available, see lists.foaf-project.org.
FOAF-related images can be found in the FOAF Flickr group. The FOAF tag on delicious is useful for finding shared-bookmarks on the topic. For Twine users, there's a FOAF Twine. And other community sites often have a FOAF or related group.

You can read about how it all works or create a FOAF file to upload. Less technical readers can learn about projects using FOAF. Or simply use some Web sites that publish FOAF for their users.
Projects
Some projects from the foaf-dev community, and the wider Web...
Services
A number of large-scale services do interesting things with FOAF data. Some of the services are RDF-oriented pieces of infrastructure, others are from a more traditionally consumer-facing angle.
RDF indexes: SWSE, Falcons, Sindice, Swoogle, PTSW.
Google's Social Graph API indexes all the public FOAF data in the Web, as well as the XFN Microformat.
Yahoo's SearchMonkey also has support for FOAF, as does OpenLink's Virtuoso product. Garlik's QDos system includes a FOAF search facility, a FOAF builder tool, and various other services.
Data
Data! See DataSources in the FOAF wiki (also FoafSites in the ESW wiki).