Plaxo: Just a Simple Tag

August 29, 2007 in Applications, Microformats by Carsten Pötter | View Comments

Online address book site Plaxo seems to be serious about opening up its service and becoming one of the forward thinking sites on the web. Anyone remember the bold statement of Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr when Plaxo was announcing support for OpenID and microformats back in July? Well, a similar statement has been made today (or was it yesterday already?):

At Plaxo, we believe strongly that users should have ownership, control, and portability of their profiles and friends list. No service you use should claim your data as their own and keep it trapped in their “walled garden”. We will continue to publish tools and articles here and on our blog to empower users and support a truly open social web.

Online Identity Consolidor

So what has been the reason of this statement? Plaxo is introducing the Online Identity Consolidor. What sounds complicated is actually hardly more than one simple HTML tag *): rel=”me”. You just have to add a link of a site or profile which provides rel=”me” tags to the Online Identity Consolidor. It will crawl that site and will follow all rel=”me” links; then it looks for reciprocal links and verifies them. That’s some kind of proof that you control both sites or profiles. In order to give you a better idea I just quote Plaxo again:

For instance, anyone could link to my twitter page, but I won’t link back with rel=”me” to any of those sites except my own home page. So if my home page links to my twitter page and vice versa, you can be sure they’re both really my pages. Similarly, if my twitter page links to my home page, my home page links to my Plaxo profile, and my Plaxo profile links to my twitter page, I’ve still established a trusted circle of links, even if no two pages link to each other in both directions.

Below is a short excerpt of the results page of my ClaimID profile. The output format is text; XML and JSON are also available.

claims Users can add profile sites to Plaxo Pulse and make them public; rel=”me” will be attached and the sites will be available in users’ public profile. Those profile are some fine hCards, by the way. Though Plaxo takes this one step further. The source code of the Online Identity Consolidor is available for download! It’s a Python script; so if you can make use of it and maybe even improve it, go for it.

I think this is really cool, though if Plaxo used MicroID some sites could be verified more easily. On the other hand if everyone added rel=”me” to links about themselves this approach would work rather well to claim ownership of websites and profiles. Should I replace the Wink widget with a blogroll about myself? It’s so easy to add rel=”me” on WordPress blogs. :)

*) Update: This (and the title as well) should be proof that I don’t know anything about tech, programming,… rel is not a tag, it is an attribute. Hell, even I should know this.

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  • rap
    thank you
  • Carsten Pötter
    Yes, people can be profiled easier. If you don't want to risk that, just don't do it. However you should be aware that this information is out there nevertheless. All those links can be found by any search engine.

    On the other hand it gives users more power to draw a more positive picture about themselves. People can find results on search engines that are not about you, though they don't know. Or they find some negative stuff about you. If you provide an easy way to get to know you, maybe people won't dig deeper. It's no guarantee, of course.
  • mel
    Has anyone ever thought about security with xml? When all the rel="me" nodes are trawled: blogs, websites, etc a profiler would get a pretty good picture of you.
  • Carsten Pötter
    OK, I just had a look at your blog. First of all, you should always link to your public profile page at the respective services. That makes more sense. You have Ziki on your blog, so the link should look like this:
    http://www.ziki.com/en/people/username

    Username is your user name on Ziki, of course.

    Now if you want to add rel="me" you have to type all links like this:
    Ziki


    or for MySpace

    MySpace
  • I tried adding blogrolling to my blog
    I tried ziki, I tried plaxo pulse
    now I guess I'll try ClaimID
    I just can't figure out how to use rel=me
    to generate this social graph
    it's me or "me" ?
    can you just give an example
  • Carsten Pötter
    Haha, that's cool. No probs, though. :)
  • Thank you so much.
    I didn't notice there was a "show advanced options".

    Please remember there are fans of your blog even in a far, far place like here, Korea. :)
  • Carsten Pötter
    Actually it's quite easy:

    1) Click 'Edit' on any of the links about you (Ziki, Naymz,...)
    2) Click on 'Show Advanced Options'
    3) Type 'me' at 'Custom Rel:'
    4) You're done :)

    Hope that helps.
  • Thanks for good article.
    BTW, do you know how to add rel="me" at ClaimID? I notice I do not have any rel="me" in my page : http://claimid.com/pebblebeach
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