Re: RFC: tent.io (protocol for social networking)

On 24 Sep 2012, at 16:54, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> On 24 September 2012 17:35, Michiel de Jong <michiel@unhosted.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 5:01 PM, Daniel Harris <daniel@kendra.org.uk> wrote:
>>> I feel our model has to cater for multiple namespaces for contacts. Can it? Can we create an meta namespaces-for-contacts wrapper?
>> 
>> yes, this is exactly what i mean when i say one namespace. i mean one
>> 'meta wrapper'. useraddress.net aims to be a search tool that can
>> support that meta wrapper. it supports webfinger/OStatus as well as
>> facebook, twitter, diaspora, friendica, and i want it to support
>> xmpp/buddycloud too.
> 
> Your interop possibilities are only as strong as your identifiers.
> 
> Consider a telephone network in berlin.  Everyone has a phone and everyone in berlin can call everyone else.  Everyone is happy.  A few people in Hamburg get a telephones too, they are happy.  Now someone from Hamburg wants to call someone in Berlin and says, "what's your area code?".  In Berlin they say, "we dont need an area code, our system works just fine.  Come to Berlin and join us".  The Hamburg person says, "I want to stay in Hamburg, cant we just all have an area code".   After much discussion every german district gets an area code and you can get german phone calls.   Now what happens when someone from the UK wants to call someone from Germany.  You need the whole reworking of identifiers again.  Identifiers are the key to interop.  It's the same on the social web and FSW.  Everyone thinks their system works fine, but silos will *never* scale beyond themselves, interop is impossible.  You only will find this out once you try and "call" another system and it fails.
> 
> Case in point.  I think useraddress.net is an awesome initiative.  But it's got the HTTP URIs wrong for both me and tim, which gives incorrect semantics, incorrect comparison and incorrect interop.  And yes I have raised the issue on github.

Where? What the exact comment/thread – so I can see?

> How long will it take to fix, I dont know ... perhaps never.  It's small details like this that prevent intercomm.  Historically getting these little details right, for whatever reason, in the FSW takes months and years, rather than hours and days.  Any plan to speed things up would be welcome!

Melvin and Michiel: I am not technical in the sense that I can fix this. But there has to be a solution. I don't believe a permanent impasse is possible. For my indulgence, imagine you had no other responsibilities other than to work on this problem. How long would it take to fix? Or is it something you can't fix on your own? Who else do you need? If you don't know them by name can you describe the kind of people you need to crack the nut? Who could do it? If it's not people but something else then let me know too.

Received on Monday, 24 September 2012 16:46:16 UTC