Being in a developer community, we come across many People who have been inspiring to us through their great works, blog posts, videos, course tutorials, podcasts and much more. What if we have a standard way to easily share those inspiring digital presence profile using a standard convention.

Hereby sharing my thoughts on this to the community and would like to hear from you all. What you think and let me know and also share your comments if there any service which is already addressed these challenges.

Background

Traditional way of Sharing Profiles in Phones uses VCARD File
(VCard, JCARD) - Wiki . But i don't find one to share a user profile about his digital presence on the Web.

Initial Proposal to Standardise Public Profile using a simple .yml file to easily share and consume by applications.

Summary

In this RFC, I am proposing a standardised way to create public profiles and share them easily to other applications. This standardised proposal will not includes and personal details like Phone Number, Address etc. This focusses mostly on the user digital presence and the corresponding links to their works, blogs and any other public account which they want to share with anyone.

Challenges

• With the increasing number of applications used by users, each of these application is using a Custom Registration form, OAuth based/SSO based Integration to collect the profile information. Once registered, the profile details are not updated on regular basis. Either some of the information are obsolete (assume the user blog site is moved to a different site)
• Even the Author doesn't have a common way to manage and update their profiles and keep the version history.

How if everyone has a common profile as a yaml file :

• Asssume a user ABC, maintains his profile using a source control version like GitHub.com. They can create multiple profiles and share wherever needed with just a Url/file.

(e.g)
http://github.com//my-profiles/default-profile.yml
http://github.com//my-profiles/work-profile.yml

Applications who want to get the user profile information, they can simply read the yaml file and update them on regular intervals.

Sample default-profile.yml

website: gyanmoti.in
country: india
name: Nirmal
profile_image_url: "https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4D03AQFgMmks5SVa_w/profile-displayphoto-shrink_200_200/0?e=1566432000&v=beta&t=XehIjAJiGztgNbN42I5fY6RWvY8dpeN4J_czWn0IRY0"
social_accounts: 
  - facebook: NA
  - twitter: nirmal_kumar
  - youtube: NA
  - linked_in: nirmalweb
creations:
  - courses: http://usercourses.com
  - publications: http://userpublications
  - podcasts: http://userpodcasts

Hereby requesting your comments for this public profile and thus making the web a better place to share and manage one's own profile.

Feel free to send a PR if you wish to add anything to this proposal here in Github.