I'd like to hear some discussion on a related topic, which is ID proliferation. I would think Chris Messina might have something to say on the topic, being involved in the DISO project. In addition to the problem of having more than one person having "@susan" there is a growing problem of a single Susan being [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], etc.
I'm bothered by the fact that most discussion seems to assume that identity is merely a projection of XMPP's ID mechanism. Wouldn't it be better to have someone's OpenID meta-data provide a discovery mechanism for any of several servers that they might be contacted on? Then the XMPP address/identity would be a lower level routing, perhaps invisible to the end user? This surely doesn't solve the SMS problem, which is due to the fact that simply more characters are needed to create globally unique addresses, but I'd like to make one observation about short (domain-specific) vs. long (domain-independent) names. In the set of all people that I talk to, on Twitter, email, or IM, I have a hard time coming up with any two that have the same local short name. Yes, there are multiple JoeCascios out there, but I don't think any of my online contacts know them. Ok, so my name is fairly uncommon. What about a JohnSmith? How many JohnSmiths do you know? Couldn't potential conflicts be handled by a personal nickname? The globally unique low level id could be mapped to my own local short alias for that person. The default short alias is their own defined short name, but I could override that to let me distinguish messages arriving at my device. JoeC
