On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Bob Wyman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Some issues tend to re-appear over and over... > > Twitter, Identi.ca, etc. implement the convention that @<local_username> is > the way to address a reply. This works fine as long as you're only working > within a single service, however, it will break down as we move to federated > systems. The problem is, of course, that usernames are not unique across > services, only within them. Thus, if I have incoming Tweets/Dents from both > Identi.ca and Twitter, I can't really use the "@" convention without a good > bit of intelligence built into my client or without expanding to something > like: @[EMAIL PROTECTED] and @[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > We went through this in email a long time ago. To make the interface "easy" > to use, the old email systems (late 70's and early 80's) used to let you > address messages without specifying the domain of the user. But, this turned > out to be a nightmare once email systems started to connect to each other. > This is why we invented the "@/AT" syntax in the first place. While you were > originally known as "foobar", you could later be addressed as either > "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" or "foobar AT domain". It was *really* hard to convince > people who had gotten used to addressing by user name only to start > including the domain or node as well. > > For a while, some email system developers tried to keep the easy to use > method by saying that you only needed to use the domain part when sending to > someone on a different service. But, that didn't work. Technically, it was > an ok solution, but the problem was that people kept making mistakes and > emails were getting routed to the wrong service. So, we now have a system > that requires that domain name be part of EVERY email address and the system > works much better. > > The growth of the @<username> convention seems to be a return to the > innocent days of the late 70's when many people were building single domain, > non-interconnected non-federated email systems. These were systems that > assumed that served *all* interesting addressees... Not good.
I'm not sure this is necessary. Or at least I don't see much of a difference between a service that aliases your name "Anders Conbere" to your email address "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". Certainly aliases have existed for ages, it's only up to these services to translate those internal id's into globally addressable ones. ~ Anders > > bob wyman > >
