Re: Network identity / brand

On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 9:21 PM, Michiel de Jong <michiel@unhosted.org>wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 10:11 PM, Evan Prodromou <evan@status.net> wrote:
> > So, what would you say for having a home on the federated social web? "Do
> > you have a node?"
>
> Yeah, that's going somewhere i think.
>
> some random associations:
>
>  diaspora had confusion between 'seeds' and 'pods' when they launched.
> for 'node' i think more of the pod (server) than of the seed (account)
>
> i have heard people call URLs links. 'send me the link of your
> project' is quite common language actually.
>
> What's your facebook? is another funny one (actually this boils down
> to what's your last name and/or what string/avatar should i look for
> to find you)
>
> it depends a lot on whether we think the user@host format should be
> fundamental, or host/path/to/file should also be an option.
>
> i predict that "what's your web?" will be the (linguistically
> incorrect) winner. after all, it's about being on the web. not just on
> facebook, but on the web itself - your web, that is.
>
> this is exciting stuff to be thinking about
>
>
This is a really important topic I think, for marketing reasons..

Whatever new network thingy you're working on, the nature of the identifier
is sooo important.

In the early days, having your own domain name was a huge thing.
Having your own email address.
Getting the Twitter handle you really like.
There was a time when people would hand out business cards that had nothing
on them but their ICQ number.

I'm a bit worried, if we tell people their identifier is user@host or
host/path/to/file or even worse an onion address, they might just yawn.
It didn't work with OpenID, people didn't want URIs as personal identifiers.
Also I'm worried that the term "web" is already too spoiled in people's
minds and that they wouldn't even want to be a "node on the web".

I'm going to say something controversial now.
And I'm not necessarily advocating it, just thinking loud.

Maybe we need a kind of identifier that doesn't exist yet.
Something that doesn't look familiar.
Something that makes people realize "oh cool, I have to be on this new
thing".
Maybe something with its own special character and syntax, just like what
Twitter did with their IDs.

I've been involved with XRI/XDI for a few years, and I know that's a really
controversial technology which we better not discuss here :)
But back then I really liked the way their identifiers look like, e.g.
=markus
I thought back then, yes that breaks web architecture, but it looks really
fresh and cool.

So the FSW/FreedomBox/etc under the hood should of course build on standard
web practices as much as possible.
But maybe we should think of some cool-looking frontend identifier (which
internally somehow translates to a URI, Webfinger address etc).

Maybe people would type any of these
=markus
=>markus
!markus
=markus.com
<markus.com>
%markus.com
*markus.com
markus*com

Okay go ahead and stone me to death :)

Markus