fernando padilla <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fri, 9 Nov 2007 00:55:54
>But no.  The userId has to be globally unique, and immutable.  So no,
>their ids should have nothing to do with a url on the site.  Change
>your url scheme and voila all apps stop working because they can't
>identify users..

Quite so.

>as to the sha(email)
>Yeah.  That works.  But I just don't think it's the purpose nor the
>goal of OpenSocial to start unifying the social networks.

But one of OpenSocial's side effects is exactly that. It doesn't have to 
be Google or Plaxo, or whoever who does it. But if large quantities of 
SN profile and graph data becomes accessible via OpenSocial, then 
somebody will build an app to do something with it.

But then there's large quantities of FOAF already available and I've yet 
to see anyone do anything useful with that.

>and then not to mention that
>emails are also not immutable nor reverse-unique: having multiple
>emails on one account ( which we all do ), changing emails during the
>life of the account ( which probably most of us have done ).

Very true. But emails have enough life and ability to be cross 
referenced to be useful. You just have to allow that they're typically 
unique to a person but a person may have many emails. And that they do 
expire.

I must have 50 or more unique identifiers associated with me. From my 4 
OpenIds to my Skype name. Perhaps what's really needed here is some more 
formalised way of mapping them all. No one ID in there is really 
suitable to be the one ID that rules them all. But the collection is 
useful. Plaxo is doing some work in this area, along with people like 
Wink. I fantasise about a Universal ID translator. Something that can 
answer "What's the Skype ID for this Twitter ID?". That idea probably 
scares a lot of people!

>Anyway, that is why you can't have a uuid for a user.. you can't just
>tell the user, here this is you uuid from now on, on all networks that
>you will ever sign up with.  Just doesn't make sense.  You can give
>the user the choice to essentially link up or associate accounts, but
>maybe they don't want that to happen, for whatever reason..  opt-in,
>intead of forced on you..

This is really a question for each individual network and their 
decisions on privacy policy. LinkedIn has for some time had the ability 
to export you contacts as Outlook CSV. People get a great deal of 
utility from that. Facebook chooses to make contact data almost 
completely inaccessible. Facebook gets utility from that. As far as 
OpenSocial goes, the standard should allow for both approaches and 
everything in between.

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