Re: Finding user profiles on a Social Net

On 6 June 2013 16:41, Simon Tennant <simon@buddycloud.com> wrote:

> I generally dislike /.well-known because it makes lots of assumptions
> about the web-root being available.
>
> Three problems with this:
> 1.  Others might run hosted personal pages like those hosted on about.me.
> For example my sister runs a hosted store on her domain. Short of getting
> the eCommerce provider to change their code, she would never be able to
> implement anything social.
>
> 2.Often times an organization will have their web-root maintained by
> another company. Page updates could easily overwrite a nice /.well-known
> hierachy.
>
> 3. I don't know the answer to this, but how long should /.well-known be
> considered authoritative? What kind of refresh interval?
>
> When you start thinking about it, this is all a hack to accomplish what
> DNS already does. DNS-SD has already solved this, and has caching, and with
> zone signing, authority.
>

Hi Simon, I got a reply from stuart re this:

"DNS-SD is not magical. It really just does one simple thing -- where a
user would have to type in an IP address, instead they can select from a
list. So if you have something where today the users would have to set it
up by typing in addresses, then DNS-SD can simplify that step."

It's quite interesting.  I'm still trying to get my head around how this
could be used, though ... :)


>
> S.
>
>
>
>
> On 6 June 2013 16:22, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I was thinking about the issue of finding user profiles on a social net,
>> and it's not always easy to know where a user's data will be located.
>> There seems to be no well known place to get user information from a
>> profile.  Which means it's harder for HTTP based social web users to talk
>> to each other.
>>
>> One increasingly popular method is to use the /.well-known/ directory.
>> The disadvantage of this approach is that is it pretty rigid and people say
>> it amounts out of band hard coding.  However one advantage is that it can
>> save a round trip, compared with follow your nose, and it can client
>> implementations more straight forward.
>>
>> Taking the well known directory a logical pattern might be to register:
>> *
>> *
>> */.well-known/user/bob*
>>
>> For the FSW?
>>
>>
>> *Would it allow redirects* -- I would say yes.
>>
>> *What would it return* -- I would suggest linked data.  Ideally a
>> browser would see html and an ajax request would see JSON, but you could
>> start with just one of the two, say JSON only.
>>
>>
>> Good idea / bad idea / too hard to implement ... thoughts?
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Simon Tennant | buddycloud.com | +49 17 8545 0880 | office hours:
> goo.gl/tQgxP
>