Currently Freetalk duplicates - or is planned to duplicate in the near future - most of the functionality of the Web of Trust plugin e.g. it will have identity pages with message counts etc. The plan is/was to hide the Web of Trust plugin and just have everything under the Discussion menu.
However, there are two additional plugins under heavy development which use WoT:
- digger3's WoT-based IRC system. This uses WoT for spam-resistant discovery.
- Artefact2's FlogHelper blog tool, which uses an identity from WoT to simplify
key management and eventually to avoid the need to announce the site and to tie
in with Freetalk for feedback.
Plus, hopefully:
- infinity0's distributed searching functionality in Library.
- evanbd's Fritter microblogging app.
- Private messaging functionality in Freetalk or a new WoT-based Freemail
version.
And probably more in future.
Two basic problems here:
1. Code duplication: All these apps will need to duplicate much of Freetalk's
duplicated WoT stuff (e.g. nagging the user if their identity hasn't been
announced, setting trust etc). Most of them don't gain much benefit from this.
2. The same identities will be reused for multiple applications, and it should
be easy to go from one to the next.
IMHO the solution to both problems is to keep the Web of Trust plugin visible,
and make it easy to use. We might want to rename it ("Anonymous Friends"? Any
other ideas?). It is essentially an anonymous social networking system: Each
user has 1) various applications, and 2) trust relationships with other users.
So, the profile page for a Known Identity should have links (and possibly
detailed information) for each of the user's contexts. So for Freetalk, there
would be how many messages he has posted, possibly a list of recent messages
and/or commonly posted to boards, and/or a link to a page in Freetalk
containing such information. For FlogHelper, there would be a link to the
identity's one and only flog. For private messaging, there would be the ability
to send a private message (whether by a link or inline). And so on.
We would keep the existing trust setting functionality, and we would have a
similar page for each of our Own Identities. In fact, we would probably only
need one menu item for Web of Trust, which would be a merger of Own Identities
with Known Identities: A list of Your Anonymous Identities, click on one to go
to its profile page, with the option to add more.
The big gain is that you can find a message on Freetalk, click on its author
and send him a private message, change his trust levels, read his flog, chat
with him in real time, search or browse his published files etc. This makes the
Web of Trust plugin both useful and easy to use.
We should be able to set the trust level from the own identity which is logged
in to the identity whose profile page we are looking at *on that page*. We
should probably also have some indication of how much we trust the other
identities listed on that page: although this complicates the UI, it is very
important practically IMHO.
As p0s has rightly pointed out, when we go from Freetalk to a specific
identity's page, our main concern is him in the context of Freetalk: We need to
be able to see how many messages he has posted, and how many messages those who
trust him have posted, as well as their trust levels etc. The current plan is
to implement this page in Freetalk, fetch the data we need from WoT, add what
we know from Freetalk, and show a Freetalk-focused page on that user. We can
continue to do this, we just need to fetch a little more from WoT: The links to
the other apps. However I expect that most WoT-based plugins will just use the
WoT identity page.
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