With no less than Bill Gates and Tim O’Reilly espousing their uses, microformats will be part of the next generation of web services. Simply put, microformats allow search engines to crawl web sites and gather information that could normally not be aggregated. One popular form of microformatting is the hCard, a web version of the vCard format that is used in Apple’s Address Book application, among others.

Microformats.org describes the benefit of the hCard, saying, “bloggers can discuss people in their blog(s) in such a way that spiders and other aggregators can retrieve this information, automatically convert them to vCards, and use them in any vCard application or service.”

Varien is more excited about hReviews which would allow a third-party to aggregate reviews from many different sites. Look up “Thundercats-Season Two Volume 1” and you would see reviews drawn from Amazon, IGN and any other site that someone had reviewed the DVD on. Microformatting will increase search-speed and allow user-generated content to be more easily accessible. Yahoo UK Movie Reviews is the biggest player to start using hReviews and I expect microformats to proliferate soon.