Global Multimedia Protocols Group

The Global Multimedia Protocols Group (GMPG) was founded in March 2003 by Tantek Çelik,{{cite book|author=Jennifer Niederst Robbins|title=Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bdf4vS2n7N8C&pg=PT21|date=21 February 2006|publisher="O'Reilly Media, Inc."|isbn=978-1-4493-7909-4|pages=21–}} Eric A. Meyer, and Matt Mullenweg.{{cite news |last1=Skeen |first1=Dan |title=Building a better blogosphere |url=https://www.smh.com.au/technology/building-a-better-blogosphere-20070327-gdprr0.html |access-date=5 February 2021 |agency=The Sydney Morning Herald |publisher=Nine Entertainment Co. |date=27 March 2007}} The group has developed methods to represent human relationships using XHTML called XHTML Friends Network (XFN) and XHTML Meta Data Profiles (XMDP), for use in weblogs.

GMPG was founded to develop the initial principles for XFN, the XHTML Friends Network as an attempt for the creation of a simple way to express human relationships on the Web within HTML (machine-readable).

{{as of|2015}}, an analysis of the network of pages collected by Common Crawl found that the web host gmpg.org had the highest PageRank and third highest in-degree of all the hosts in the network.{{cite journal | url=http://vigna.di.unimi.it/ftp/papers/GraphStructure.pdf |

title = The Graph Structure in the Web --- Analyzed on Different Aggregation Levels |

last1 = Meusel | first1 = Robert | last2 = Vigna | first2 = Sebastiano | last3 = Lehmberg | first3 = Oliver | last4 = Bizer | first4 = Christian |

journal = Journal of Web Science | date = 2015 | pages = 33–47 | volume = 1 | access-date = April 24, 2017|

doi = 10.1561/106.00000003 |

hdl = 2434/372411 | hdl-access = free }}

The name of the group was taken from the 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash.Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash", chapter 3, Bantam Books (USA), June 1992 {{ISBN|0-553-08853-X}}