Over 1 million Webmentions will have been sent across the internet since the specification was made a full Recommendation by the W3C—the standards body that guides the direction of the web—in early January 2017.

That’s amazing, because I’ve never even heard of a Webmention, let alone seen one sent. What are Webmentions and why should we care?

Webmention is a (now) standardized protocol that enables one website address (URL) to notify another website address that the former contains a reference to the latter. It also allows the latter to verify the authenticity of the reference and include its own corresponding reference in a reciprocal way.

So it’s basically pingbacks, only with @ symbols?

A Webmention is simply an @mention that works from one website to another!

So it’s basically pingbacks, only with @ symbols… Still, I believe taking platform-specific features and making them broadly available across the web is a Good Thing, so I’m all for Webmentions and efforts like it.

Click through to learn more about use cases, how to implement them on your site, and which platforms have them baked in.