Re: users vs topics

Hi Kingsley,

i prefer to start with modeling the stuff we need first, so for users
just avatar, a free-text full name, maybe city and gender, and then a
list of tools (read, subscribe, comment, message). That way we can
chart a big part of the federated social web already i think, except
for things like mailing lists and chat channels. So that's what i
wanted to bring up in this thread. Maybe i didn't phrase my question
clearly enough, sorry.

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 5:52 PM, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
> You need to model everything.

Everything? although i doubt you really mean what you say there, i'm
afraid that might be an uncomputable problem ;)

When you write an application you should take care not to try to write
an operation system instead. An application has a specific function,
which is limited and is not 'it should do everything' (that is what
operating systems and programming languages are for).

if next year it becomes a big thing on the web to be friends with an
elephant, then we might want to add a 'species' field to the
useraddress.net search results, but for now that seems like overkill.

as i thought a bit more about the concept of 'topics', i felt that
maybe they are specific types of 'groups', because a chat session is
defined ultimately by the people participating in it, and only
secondarily by the topic that these people agreed on. it is also
possible to have a group or group chat without a preset topic. So i
think i might use 'group' instead of 'topic'.

Anyway, it's just a proof-of-concept, so we can always change it later
if we get new insights.

Received on Friday, 27 July 2012 08:34:21 UTC