Re: the possible impact of future changes in webfinger (was Re: Anonymity and multiple identities)

On 7 July 2012 12:35, Michiel de Jong <michiel@unhosted.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 1:23 PM, Melvin Carvalho
> <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> > After 3 years, I dont feel it's delivered on its promises,
>
> which promises were not delivered, and who can do (or who should have
> done) what to fix that?
>
> how does this feeling affect how you now think identity should be
> federated? should we use centralized search instead?
>
> Note that webfinger is important at the moment you action a friend
> request. once two people are friends, you no longer need webfinger,
> because you have other ways to communicate. But without webfinger, the
> only way to send a friend request is by using a centralized database.
>
> > and the world has moved on.
>
> i was not aware of this - who is 'the world' here? to what did these
> people move on? to having nothing?
>
> > I look forward to you, and other webfinger evangelists, proving me
> wrong.  :)
>
> if you decide to stand on the sideline saying "what you're doing is
> never going to work" without helping to build something, then that
> would be a great loss for this CG. Please help with doing the actual
> wrong-proving! :)
>
> Concretely, what mechanism do you suggest for friend requests?
>

Webfinger should be a standard by now, or at least the peer reviewed
documentation of an existing process.  Despite your claims to the contrary,
it is not.  It's not a particularly complex problem to solve, and we've
been waiting for 3 years.  The IETF have made it clear that is has some
severe weaknesses, and that everything is still on the table including a
rewrite (depending on what track it chooses, standards or informational).

In the meantime linked data, and for example facebook open graph, have
become standards and have been adopted by 10's of millions of sites, as a
way of discovering information.

I'm perfectly happy for you to evangelize your preferred way to solve a
problem.  However, I think pretending that your solution is the ONLY
solution is inaccurate.  There's lots of great technology on the web, and
on the social web, and may the best systems win.

I'm still looking forward to webfinger being a uniform way to discover more
information about an email address in a structured way.  I think that's a
great use case to solve and will bring the big webmail providers that much
closer to the web, with all their millions of users.  But we're still not
there yet, and we'll just have to wait and see what the powers that be
decide.


>
> Cheers,
> Michiel
>