rel-me

<entry-title>rel="me"</entry-title>

short URL

http://tr.im/rel_me

XFN 1.1 introduced the "me" rel value which is used to indicate profile equivalence and for identity-consolidation.

rel="me" is used on hyperlinks from one page about a person to other pages about that same person.

For example, Tantek's home page has (markup simplified)

<a href="http://twitter.com/t" rel="me">@t</a>

And his Twitter profile itself has (markup simplified)

<a href="http://tantek.com/" rel="me">http://tantek.com/</a>

Thus establishing a bi-directional rel-me link and confirming that the two URLs represent the same person.

Publishers can use the XFN creator form to create rel-me hyperlinks.

screencast and videos

Watch some short videos:

• David Recordon's excellent *30 second* explanation of XFN rel="me".
• Brad Fitzpatrick explains rel="me" and more XFN.
• Joseph Smarr's whiteboard explanation of rel="me" as implemented in the Plaxo online identity aggregator.

Longer:

• Gavin Bell on "What is your provenance?" (40 minutes) - provides a much broader discussion of the problem statement of who is a person on the Web, and starting at about 0:07:30 explains how hCard + rel="me" helps solve this problem.

tutorials

A simple data portability project or is it rel=me summary by Bob Ngu

implementations

WordPress plugins:

• Social Links Wordpress plugin - supports rel-me links to other services
• About Me plugin (on github) - supports creation of an About Me page with rel-me links to other profiles.

rel-me-auth

RelMeAuth is a proposed open standard for using rel-me links to profiles on OAuth supporting services to authenticate via either those profiles or your own site.

Read more about RelMeAuth.

see also

• services that support rel="me"
• xfn
• rel
• social network portability
• XFN 1.1 profile