Re: Let's blow some new life into this community group

On 04/07/12 02:29 PM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
> Perhaps some of FSW might also think about identity. Arguably our 
> biggest challenge as technologists is to see, to identify, and to name.
>
> A good identification system lends itself quite well to federation, in 
> that you can give yourself a headstart.
>
> I suppose there's 2 schools of thought.
>
> 1) Facebook has identity on the social web sewn up
> 2) Everyone else competing for the rest of the pie
>
> I've never been clear on how FSW identifies a user, tho I've been 
> impressed with the original status.net <http://status.net> / identi.ca 
> <http://identi.ca> implementations of FOAF.
>
> I see new social nets come up every few months with a goal of 
> federation.  I always ask a simple question: 'how do you identify a 
> user'.  Most of the time they dont know.  A really good method for 
> identification makes it that much easier to federate with your peers, 
> imho.

Obviously identity is the root of any social network. Unfortunately, 
it's one of those subjects that gets insanely complicated really fast.

People tend to mix up identity with remote login, authentication, 
profile data, and authorization.

With OStatus we use either a Webfinger address like "evan@identi.ca" or 
an HTTP URL like "http://identi.ca/evan".

-Evan

-- 
Evan Prodromou, CEO and Founder, StatusNet Inc.
1124 rue Marie-Anne Est #32, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H2J 2B7
E: evan@status.net P: +1-514-554-3826