kartooner

XFN is a sim­ple way to rep­re­sent human rela­tion­ships using hyper­links. It is essen­tially a method of build­ing a net­work of links indi­cat­ing your rela­tion­ship with that par­tic­u­lar per­son or com­pany you’ve linked to.

I’ve imple­mented XFN and proudly dis­play the but­ton on the side­bar. It is some­thing I’ve been kick­ing around for a while because I wasn’t edu­cated as to what XFN’s pur­pose was. Not until I read ‘Friend, XFN and Hyper­links’ by Shirley Kaiser (of Brain­storms and Raves fame) did I fully real­ize the poten­tial of XFN. Shirley describes XFN as “a sim­ple way to rep­re­sent human rela­tion­ships within hyperlinks”.

The process of imple­ment­ing this is delight­fully sim­ple, for example;

Let’s say you’re link­ing to your girlfriend’s web site. The link to her web site is http://www.bayareachicawica and her rela­tion­ship to you would fall under the rela­tion­ship cat­e­gory of ‘roman­tic’. A quick look at the XFN cheat sheet and you notice four sub-categories; muse, crush, date and sweetheart.

At this point you would need to decide which sub­cat­e­gory she would fall under. For this exam­ple we’ll go ahead and use ‘sweet­heart’ which accord­ing to the XFN descrip­tion is some­one with whom you are inti­mate and some­what com­mit­ted to.

A link to her web site would nor­mally look like this:


<a href="http://www.bayareachicawica.com" alt="Mary's site">My
girlfriend</a>


To XFN’ize the link we sim­ply add a rela­tion tag (rel) like so:


<a href="http://www.bayareachicawica.com" alt="Mary's site" rel="sweetheart">My
girlfriend</a>


After­wards, sub­mit your site to Rub­hub, the rela­tion­ship lookup engine. As described on the XFN web site “Rub­hub will index your XFN rela­tion­ships, add you to its global net­work of XFN Friendly sites, and let you see how peo­ple relate to you and how you relate to other people.”