>
> a lot of people on identi.ca self-identify like this "identi.ca/brianjesse"
> -- I noticed it at #bearhugcamp when a reporter was asking people for their
> URLs. Zach Copley said "identi.ca/zach" twitter people do that too. and
> everybody on myspace.
I do this too, and to me that is the appeal of it. We'd be creating a new
technology around an already established practice. To be honest, prior to
this discussion I had never heard of XRI. While yes, it could work and
could be integrated later, I'm not sure that I see the benefits over URI
since so many people are already familiar with URIs. My business card is
full of URI's, but I think it will be a long time before I'd ever put an XRI
on there.
The @ symbol has been used as the seperator between usernames and domains
> by so many other services, that it only makes sense to keep it there as
> opposed to using something else.
The problem is you are never going to retrain microbloggers to use something
other than @username to direct their messages to a user, which leaves us
with @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] made a lot of sense when it was first used in '71 (25 years
before HTTP was standardized). But now with HTTP being the most important
in a mix of protocols that will hopefully shape microblogging, I think it is
very important to include it when determining how to identify people. It's
almost like URI should be used for identification, HTTP used for discovery /
pull transport, and XMPP for push / pull transport.
Thinking more about it, assuming we go with the email-style
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] identifier, do we even need a character to identify
> that you are mentioning a person?
I've thought about that too, but I think the inherent hurdle with that is
again... we'd have to retrain people to not use @username and instead use
[EMAIL PROTECTED] That's a big hurdle to overcome since people have been
doing @username since '05 on Twitter. Then what if you want to @reply
someone on Twitter from within Twitter? You don't want to require the
@twitter part for intra-service messaging cause 99% of people won't use it.
At that point, you are just left with {username}, which won't work because
usernames are often just common words.
IMO, the @ symbol prefixing the string is a requirement because it has been
used for years and people just aren't going to shift away from it. Sure
Laconi.ca peeps can go their own way and change the @reply rules, but we
really want something that jives with Twitter users too so Twitter can be
persuaded to hop on board with this cross-service routing scheme.
---
It's good to discuss all these additional alternatives, but I still haven't
seen one that beats @URI, it just makes sense too much sense. A use like
this is exactly what URI was designed for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier
> In computing, a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a compact string of
> characters used to identify or name a resource on the Internet. The main
> purpose of this identification is to enable interaction with representations
> of the resource over a network, typically the World Wide Web, using specific
> protocols.
>
In any message prefix a URI with an @ symbol and that server is ping'd with
your message and can determine what it wants to do with it. Heck, it is
almost like trackbacks.
This is more of a pipe-dream, but I'd love to be able to type into some
message box myspace.com/tom or facebook.com/zuck, and have it
actually delivered to their inbox on myspace or facebook. At that point,
could micro-blogging be integrated with the same intra-site messaging we've
been using on message boards, forums, social networks, etc... for the last
decade? Could this be a full replacement for email? If this is a
standardized, the micro-blogosphere could go from 4 million to 104 million
users overnight if MySpace or Facebook hopped on board. But, some contend
adoption by the masses (*cough* AOL) killed usenet, could it kill
micro-blogging? Those are questions for another thread, but it is something
to keep in mind when developing ideas for where we want to steer this boat.
On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 10:45 PM, Brian Hendrickson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:
>
> My apologies to anybody who I offended when I shared & "tested" my idea for
> cross-site addressing. I just wanted to see what it would look like
>
> http://identi.ca/notice/625565
>
> http://identi.ca/notice/625553
>
> my test generated an incredulous reply from Jack Moffitt, who may have
> thought me an upstanding person before that moment. kshep too. sorry guys
>
> Jack please delete my comment from your site (if you didn't already), I
> don't want to start a messy discussion there. Evan mentioned the URL idea
> and credited me so I thought I should just explain it and be done with it.
>
> But I totally agree with what Derek said about naming. and his "slow motion
> moment" haha. He inspired me to share my idea, i'm fine with it if it goes
> no further.
>
> a lot of people on identi.ca self-identify like this "identi.ca/brianjesse"
> -- I noticed it at #bearhugcamp when a reporter was asking people for their
> URLs. Zach Copley said "identi.ca/zach" twitter people do that too. and
> everybody on myspace.
>
> obviously e-mail format is a much more common meme, and is used for XMPP
> JID best-practice lately.
>
> and then there's the proper XRI stuff which is technically sound and
> demonstrates the potential for simplicity (@ahynes1 and that's it) but maybe
> could be difficult for laypersons to take advantage of, and not free
>
> -- Brian
>
>
> On Sep 22, 2008, at 11:23 AM, Derek Gathright wrote:
>
> Oooo... yeah, I hadn't even thought about people using a domain as their
> microblogging ID, but it makes sense for single-user laconi.ca (or other
> platform) instances.
>
> On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 12:08 PM, Joe Cascio, Jr. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:
>
>> Absolutely agree. A URI is the only way.
>> I think the most compelling reason, other that being a well-known standard
>> already, is that a URI makes discovery possible. So, for instance, I could
>> be "http://joecascio.net";. Just like my blog home page declares my OpenID
>> server and delegate, so it could declare my microblogging server and ID.
>> This also helps to attack the problem of ID proliferation. The individual
>> sub-IDs I may be known by for email, IM, microblogging or whatever now can
>> be subsumed by one master ID, or as many as I want to have to serve my
>> various on-line activities, sort of like carrying multiple credit cards.
>>
>> JoeC
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Derek Gathright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:
>>
>>> How exactly we namespace micro-blogging usernames was a topic Evan
>>> discussed at Bearhug Camp and unfortunately I wasn't able to be in
>>> attendance to throw in my 2 cents. But to me this is an extremely important
>>> issue that deserves discussion, so I'm bringing the debate here.
>>>
>>> Here's the problem (as I see it): If
>>> microblogging/micromessaging/tweeting/whateveryouwanttocallit is going to
>>> truly be cross-platform, there needs to be a way to direct messages not only
>>> to users within your own platform (i.e. Twitter, Identi.ca, etc...) as well
>>> as direct messages to users on other platforms (like how email works).
>>> Also, when your message/tweet is sent to another platform and it has an
>>> @reply in it, how is that @reply portrayed on that other platform?
>>>
>>> Example: Currently there are Identi.ca users that make use of a bridge to
>>> relay their messages from Identi.ca to Twitter, and when those messages
>>> contain an @reply, those also get carried over to Twitter. That's fine &
>>> dandy until someone sends an @reply to identi.ca/bob who is different
>>> from twitter.com/bob, and twitter.com/bob starts getting all these
>>> tweets in his reply timeline that are not really supposed to be directed at
>>> him. The purist in me says that is a big issue that needs to be resolved
>>> before more people start doing the same thing (*cough*
>>> http://laconi.ca/trac/ticket/68) because it can have a detrimental
>>> effect on the experience for users on other systems.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately I don't remember all the options Evan had written on the
>>> whiteboard at Bearhug Camp, but here are some that I had thought of a few
>>> weeks back when this issue arose
>>>
>>> @identi.ca/derek
>>> @derek/identi.ca
>>> @derek::identi.ca
>>> @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>> @http://identi.ca/derek
>>> etc...
>>>
>>> You can see patterns develop, and really it just comes down to what
>>> symbols you want to use. So what are the similarities/differences between
>>> them? Well, all of them are made-up URI's aside from the ones that actually
>>> point to the user's true URI, @http://identi.ca/derek & @identi.ca/derek
>>> .
>>>
>>> As a client developer that has played with mixing twitter &
>>> identi.catimelines (unlike Twhirl for example which separates them into
>>> different
>>> windows) I've really thought about this issue, and the only one that
>>> really makes sense to me is the true URI. If micro-blogging
>>> proliferates as much as we hope, multi-platform clients are going to be fed
>>> many @reply messages directed at users that aren't hosted on their platform.
>>> If I get a message that contains @derek/twitarmy in my client, I would have
>>> have zero idea where to actually point for that user's URI or what platform
>>> "twitarmy" even is unless I rely on a list of all the micro-blogging
>>> platforms out there (bad idea). However, if my client gets a message that
>>> contains @army.twit.tv/derek and I have never heard of "army.twit.tv",
>>> it's no big deal because I have a great idea of where to point my user to in
>>> order to find more information about "derek". Platforms and/or clients can
>>> also of course hide the service domain if it doesn't make sense to display
>>> that info (i.e. if the recipient is on the same domain as the sender).
>>>
>>> Just think about how different the internet would be if email addresses
>>> weren't "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" but instead would be "gmail.com/drgath".
>>> That would in fact be your true URI where people could send messages to via
>>> email, could visit via HTTP to see who that person is, could chat with that
>>> person via XMPP by adding that user to their buddy list, could be used as an
>>> OpenID, etc... Social networking would have evolved much differently and
>>> there may not be the need for developer unfriendly silos like MySpace and
>>> Facebook. Social networking could be... *gasp*... distributed! We can
>>> finally use a "Universal Resource Identifier" to actually be a universal way
>>> to identify and access a person.
>>>
>>> Now, adding all of the additional modules to handle that functionality
>>> may or may not ever happen, but the potential is at least there.
>>>
>>> Back to Bearhug Camp... I didn't catch all of the conversation
>>> surrounding this namespacing/routing issue and where the conversation left
>>> off. But I did see Evan erase the "@http://identi.ca/username"; option
>>> and said he was comfortable with the other approaches. It was one of those
>>> slow-motion "nooooooo!" moments and I wanted to raise the issue to see what
>>> other developers thought. Am I crazy?
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Laconica-dev mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
>>>
>>>
>>
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