I have been talking about Microformats for more than a year. The movement is exciting and if our experience with hResume is any indication, their use and popularity is growing. I suspect that Microsoft’s support will increase the rate of growth exponentially.
When we first launched the hResume plugin it was downloaded more than 10,000 times in the first week. Less than 1,000 people actually installed it. Since then we believe that around 38,000 have downloaded the plugin and around 2,900 send us pings each month. Each day I am notified of between one and five WordPress blogs, such as Hunter Johnson’s, that have installed our hResume plugin for the first time. This is interesting because we have spent ZERO time working on it since launch (focused on paying clients). Keep your eyes open for the next phase of the project…
Last week I met with the SimpleTicket team to talk about the roadmap for the remainder of the year and for the first quarter of 2007. Microformats were clearly one of the most important subjects covered in our meeting. If you are working on web applications I would highly recommend including Microformats where ever possible.
Thanks for sharing your stats. This is very interesting stuff. But I’m wondering whether you feel you’ve jumped the gun releasing a plug-in for a microformat that is still in Draft status? Aren’t you worried that the specification could still change significantly. I’d love to hear your view on this.
If the specification changes significantly we would simply update the plugin. As with all Microformats the hresume specification is built on the others ~ i.e. hcard, hcalendar and so on ~ there is little chance that all of the specifications will change. Also, there will likely be backwards compatibility. But at the end of the day, assuming they changed every aspect of the specification it would only take an hour or two to update the plugin and release it.