Re: Finding user profiles on a Social Net

On 6 June 2013 16:46, Evan Prodromou <evan@e14n.com> wrote:

>  I think the "self" link relationship works well here, especially with a
> "type" saying what type of data is available.
>
> That can be discovered either in a profile page, a Webfinger account, an
> activitystrea.ms object, or other places that links are discoverable.
>

Thanks for pointing this out.  Self is an interesting way of doing things,
I'd not considered that before.

However there's something of a chicken and egg problem.  In the case where
you have a link relation ie a subject and an object, you can "follow your
nose" using the link type.  However without that original entry point it's
harder to begin the link following process.

The idea here is that you get a bootstrap into a given host or network and
can start to explore friendships and communications, using linked data.


>
> -Evan
>
>
> On 13-06-06 10:22 AM, Melvin Carvalho 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?
>
>
>

Received on Friday, 7 June 2013 08:05:25 UTC