So what's the situation when you're following someone with a really long name? Let's say I am following - AlexanderGrahamBell and Alex -- isn't that the same issue?
If you just truncate the name when it is different (Alexa vs Alex), what happens when you add Alexandria and so on? These are limitations of the SMS protocol (140 character limit) bumping up against limitations of uniquely identifying senders. If we weren't using an SMTP to SMS gateway - the SMS number identifies the sender, but in Twitter's case (and most cases) it's too expensive to have an SMS# assigned to every user so identification is included in the message body. There are several possible solutions to this, but unless there are plans to change the SMS protocol (not likely) it will be up to the service to determine how they want to handle this (e.g. let users assign nicknames to people they follow up to a certain # of characters - say 5, and limit messages to 135 characters). This will get truncated, but Twitter basically built a model around the "legacy" constraints of the SMS protocol and used it in their positioning (e.g. Microblogging). It's pretty clever because the limitations of SMS are actually marketed as a "benefit" (get your updates in bite-size chunks). Fun stuff. On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 2:44 PM, Bob Wyman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 2:56 PM, anders conbere <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > > 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]". > > Imagine that you're using a federated system like Identi.ca rather than a > walled-garden system like Twitter. Now, imagine that you subscribe to two > different people: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] (two people, same > local name). Given this, what would a message look like if it is delivered > to you via SMS? In that case, the alias "anders" wouldn't do you any good > since you wouldn't know *which* anders was responsible for the message. Your > SMS server would be forced to expand the alias out to include the domain in > order to allow you to show you who sent the message. But, in doing so, it > would lengthen the message and might, therefore, result in the message > growing to more than the maximum number of characters for an SMS message... > So, your SMS system might have to cut off the end of the message and thus, > potentially lose important information. > > bob wyman > >
