XFN (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel’ attribute to their <a href> tags, e.g.:
<a href=”http://jeff.example.org” rel=”friend met”>…
Learn more at http://www.gmpg.org/xfn/
XFN PLUGINS FOR WORDPRESS
There are a few XFN – XHTML Friends Network plugins already created for WordPress. You can find XFN plugins by searching Google for “WordPress plugin xfn” or you can see a list of the stored plugins at WordPress here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=xfn
Here’s a couple of my favorite FXN plug-ins for WordPress.
Blogroll Links
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blogroll-links/
Author: Rajiv Pant
For people who maintain their Web site or blog using the WordPress blog content management system, blogroll-links is an open source WordPress plugin that uses WordPress built-in Blogroll feature and presents links to friends’ home pages and own pages on social networking sites using XFN in the links.
Features of this plugin
- It can show the links by category in blog posts and WordPress Pages.
- It uses WordPress standard built-in Blogroll links database. There is no hassle of another list of links to maintain.
- It can be used to show only the links assigned to a particular category, by stating the category slug as defined in that category’s setting in Wordpress.
- It honors the Show/Hidden setting as defined for each link in WordPress.
- It displays the link in the same window or new window, as specified for each link in WordPress.
XFN Icons
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xfn-icons/
Author: Samuel Elliott
Adds Icons after links according to whether you’ve specified XFN or not. XFN (XHTML Friends Network) is a way of adding properties to links to specify relationships between the two sites, or the two subjects of the sites. Wordpress supports them by default, and you can add them by looking further down the page on the “Add Links” Page in the Admin Area.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project
foaf project Friend of a Friend
FOAF is about your place in the Web, and the Web’s place in our world. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online.
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.
Google’s Social Graph API
http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/
The public web is made up of linked pages that represent both documents and people. Google Search helps make this information more accessible and useful. If you take away the documents, you’re left with the connections between people. Information about the public connections between people is really useful — as a user, you might want to see who else you’re connected to, and as a developer of social applications, you can provide better features for your users if you know who their public friends are. There hasn’t been a good way to access this information. The Social Graph API now makes information about the public connections between people on the Web, expressed by XFN and FOAF markup and other publicly declared connections, easily available and useful for developers.
Google Social Graph
Tags: Google, Social Media, Strategy 2.0, Web 2.0
