Facebook should go all the way

Facebook has started adding hCalendar and hCard microformat markup to the millions of “events” listed in their site.

In theory, this could free up the date, time, location, and related event information for linking and use by other sites and applications.  I’ve previously written about Facebook’s moves toward open standards in a series on this blog (click here to read about their path towards opening up the Facebook Platform and APIs).  This takes Facebook one step further down that path.

As was noted on microformats.org:

Facebook’s deployment of hCalendar is just the latest in their series of slow but steadily increasing support for open standards and microformats in particular. Over two years ago Facebook added hCard support to their user profiles. Last year they announced support for OAuth 2.0, as well as adding XFN rel-me support to user profiles, thus interconnecting with the world wide distributed social web. They proudly documented their use of HTML5. And now, millions of hCalendar events with hCard venues.

But is this step only a half step?

Including microformat markup only gets us half-way to where Facebook could take event information, and especially the location information from hCard markup, on the web.

Click here to read the full post on the PayPal X Developer Network and learn how and why Facebook should finish what they’ve started with Events.