A new version of XFN has been released, with a few changes and a few new attributes. (XFN, the “XHTML Friends Network” is a simple way of adding information to a link to indicate your relationship to that person.)
New relationship types include kin and contact, expanding the family and friendship dimensions, and me. The primary reason to add me seems to involve linking together profiles at multiple social networking sites – Friendster, Orkut, etc., but it brings up an interesting question:
How do you handle a site run by more than one person? We’ve had XFN info on this page since sometime last year, and it’s worked, because we share mostly the same circle of friends. But we also have links to our individual websites. Should these both be marked “me?” Presumably not, since the separate sites wouldn’t represent the same person. Perhaps something to consider for XFN 1.2?
I think I saw a suggestion on Tantek’s site about multi-author sites. It said that you should avoid using XFN in your blogroll, and only add the rel attributes to links in posts that you write. This gives a context for the relation.
Thanks, I just found it!
I think I’ll probably leave XFN up on the blogroll for our mutual friends — it’s still accurate, after all. But I’ll limit anything else to links in individual posts, like Tantek suggested, or to links on my own site.