Me pages
19 May 2009 · web development · microformats · social networking
Have you ever taken a look at the Google Social Graph API? In their words it:
returns web addresses of public pages and publicly declared connections between them.
Eeerrrr, okaaaay. What it means is that Google can connect the various profiles you have created for yourself around the web - on Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, and dozens of other sites.
They do this by looking at the links on these profile pages and the declared relationships of those links.
http://gmpg.org/xfn/ http://www.foaf-project.org/
And there’s one relationship that doesn’t seem to get as much attention as it might: rel=”me”. This tells the reader/parser that the link’s href attribute refers to the page owner. Most of my profiles list my website (donotremove.co.uk).
That only makes the claim in one direction. Basically, it’s an unsubstantiated claim. To reassure Google that I really do own both donotremove.co.uk and twitter.com/mikesten both of those sites need to claim each other. A kind of double opt-in. And this is where “me” pages come in.
A “me” page is a place to claim your distributed identities.
It’s taken me about 4 years to get around to making one of these for myself but having finally made a “me” page, I thought I’d run through the concept.
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