On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Toby Inkster<m...@tobyinkster.co.uk> wrote: > [This message probably won't reach foaf-dev as I'm subscribed to that list > using a different e-mail address... for hysterical raisins.] > > On 29 Aug 2009, at 08:57, Dan Brickley wrote: > >> OK here's a concrete proposal in more depth - "Dockable". > > Sounds like a good idea in principle. > >> I'd like my photo URLs at http://photos.danbri.org or >> http://flickr.danbri.org, rather than at http://flickr.com, however >> much I love Flickr. I'd like my music profile and playlists to be at >> http://music.danbri.org/ instead of at http://last.fm/danbri, and I'd >> to be able to microblog using http://status.danbri.org/ rather than >> http://identi.ca/danbri. > > For sites such as these which are currently "undockable", there is the > option of setting up these subdomains and performing an HTTP 302 redirect. > Unless told though, people would probably keep using the flickr.com, etc > domain names which linking to them.
Yup. This is something I hope we'll see more of, in terms-of-service documents: commitments from the service provider about how long, and in what way, they'll facilitate forwarding. Having played with purl.org lately I reckon there are quite a few options even here - partial redirects, redirects with transformations, etc. >> Being "docked" - online or off - has many advantages, so many that in >> the real world, undocking and moving your boat elsewhere can be a big >> hassle. > > One such that immediately springs to mind it that if you did decide to point > photos.danbri.org from Flickr to a different service, you'd probably still > break a lot of URLs because the other service would almost certainly use a > different URL structure. Yup. We lack conventions for documenting site-layout patterns. Some sites are relatively clean in their layout, and so could be ported directly, or transformed to other patterns. Others are ... pretty chaotic, with all kinds of corner case. But these patterns are slowly being documented and semi-standardised, as trends emerge. http://bitworking.org/projects/URI-Templates/spec/draft-gregorio-uritemplate-03.html might have some value for documenting site structure. >> Dockable microblogging - so what's the story here for StatusNet and >> microblogging? > > As I understand it -- and I'm not claiming to speak for StatusNet/status.net > -- that's sort of the idea of status.net (which is not to be confused with > StatusNet). It's going to be a hosting platform for microblogging sites at > your choice of domain name. At any point you could presumably get a dump of > the data, pull it into a different installation of StatusNet and repoint the > domain name at your new installation. Yep, I'm interested in Evan's feedback on this. From what I read about status.net's business angle, the initial idea is that a company (who want a twitteresque experience, but under their control), or a pre-existing online community, or a product/brand ... these might set up a hosted installation of the StatusNet code, with hundreds or thousands of user accounts all managed within the same domain / namespace. This is great and I have no doubt there are many businesses willing to pay for something like this to be integrated with their internal contacts or staff directory, to improve information flow internally, or their public online presence. My suggestion is that there is also a role for a more fine-grained hosting mechanism, where different domains are used for each user account, rather than for each "site". Perhaps this is also part of the status.net plan, I don't know :) Oh, one thought about the @ conventions... - perhaps the Open Microblogging spec (or just social conventions) should make "." a reserved/significant character when it matches a regex like (excuse the poor i18n, this is just rough) /@[A-Zaz\.]+\s/ ... ie. to allow domain names preceded by @ to be used when addressing people. So @tobyinkster.co.uk might be way to identify you, @danbri.org could be me. Or is that confusing 'cos it looks too much like email? But it can help address the ambiguity problem; @scobleizer.com would be Robert Scoble's nick everywhere, without having to have him set up accounts, or reclaim accounts, on ever new microblogging service. This is of course related to the OpenID discussions, and the account uri scheme proposal - http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2009/08/making-the-case-for-a-new-acct-uri-scheme-for-accounts.html - ideally people would own at least some of the domain names they use as openids, in which case, keeping them short makes sense. But this is all a side topic; there are issues with federated @-messaging that need to be addressed regardless of the dockability/dns story... Thanks for the feedback, Dan _______________________________________________ Laconica-dev mailing list Laconica-dev@laconi.ca http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
