On Thu Jul 31 18:13:47 2008, Blaine Cook wrote:
I'll argue that until we have said federated networks, this is a
moot point
(c.f., the @reply convention in twitter was, as Lachlan said, only
codified
once people using the service had actually used @replies.
Alternative forms
that were (possibly still are) accepted by twitter are "name: " and
"r name
"). My claim is that emergent behaviour should be observed and
codified once
a federated system exists, not before.
I'll go along with that - you're essentially saying that the
user-driven syntax of replies is a property of the interface, not the
protocol, so really, whether we choose @[EMAIL PROTECTED] or [http://...] or
BANANA! BANANA! YIMBO! PITOW! ... BANANA! (the latter being, frankly,
my personal favourite based on æsthetic reasons) matters little to
the protocol. At the protocol level, we simply need fully qualified,
globally unique, names - we need to agree on the form of those names,
and how to encode them for machine readability, but otherwise how
they're formatted to the end-user has no impact to the protocol.
There's a thumping great impact on the interface, of course, and user
expectation will lean toward consistent interfaces, but this will, as
Blaine says, come out in the wash, and meanwhile, interface ease of
use will be a strong differentiating factor.
I mean, sorry, lightweight semantic markups used by user interfaces
to instances of the federated microblogosphere are a clear instance
of emergent behaviour. (Do I get a prize for that many buzzwords?)
I will point out that we should build the basics, and then expand
upon ideas
once we have groundwork to expand upon. All of this is pure
speculation.
Which is why anyone can have an opinion, even me. :-)
No - the real problem is being able to do replies to the correct
thread.
Impractical, or impossible, for some interfaces, including SMS. But
this is okay, this is why we have XMPP user interfaces, and tell
people to use XMPP clients on their phones. Or email. Or whatever.
Or, maybe there's a really clever classifier handling incoming SMS
messages and matching them up by subject material to SMS messages
it's sent the user.
Or maybe someone decides that telling users how to use a bunch of
cryptic symbols in SMS messages is going to be more fun.
Dave.
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