Re: Finding user profiles on a Social Net

I agree with Owen,

 Although I've managed my own DNS servers many times in the past, I now
offload that service to my domain registrar for a number of reason,
convenience and uptime being the primary.

 Most registrars do not have programmable APIs to automatically update DNS
records (unless you pay big money for the professional DNS service
providers).

 This means that, in order for most people to play ball, they will have to
go use their providers web-interface to update their DNS records everytime
they want to make a change for lookup.

Setting aside the DNS learning curve for newcomers, out of sheer
inconvenience this not a process I'd voluntarily sign up for :)

-Nick



On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 6:29 PM, Owen Shepherd <owen.shepherd@e43.eu> wrote:

>
>   Michał 'rysiek' Woźniak <rysiek@fwioo.pl>
>  11 June 2013 15:32
>
> +1
>
> That would be the best solution, but no social network software I know of
> implements it. Instead, webfinger is being used. :/
>
>
>  What concrete advantages do you get from DNS-SD over Webfinger? All I see
> is the negative that now you have to have DNS control of your domain, in
> addition to HTTP control, and it still doesn't answer the question of how
> you do user discovery.
>
> Webfinger provides the ability to do both:
>
>    - rel="about", rel="self" or rel="alternate"  (just pick one and run
>    with it) can be used to link to the user's profile page, API "profile" and
>    various other information. Hypothetically: [
>    {"rel":"self", "type":"text/html", "href":"https://example.org/~person"<https://example.org/~person>
>    },
>    {"rel":"self", "type":"application/stream+json", "href":
>    "https://api.example.org/user/person"<https://api.example.org/user/person>
>    },
>    {"rel":"self", "type":"text/vcard", "href":
>    "https://api.example.org/user/person/vcard"<https://api.example.org/user/person/vcard>
>    },
>    {"rel":"self", "type":"application/vcard+xml", "href":
>    "https://api.example.org/user/person/vcard.xml"<https://api.example.org/user/person/vcard.xml>
>    }]
>    - Custom relations can be used to link to whatever API endpoints the
>    user needs. For example, Pump.io uses the (presently unregistered)
>    "activity-inbox" and "activity-outbox" links (these are, of course, user
>    dependent)
>    - Finally, you might need other relationships for client associations
>    (i.e. OAuth and similar). They could be located either in the WebFinger
>    response for the user (may reduce the number of requests required) or in
>    the host metadata
>
> I don't get why one would suggest combining both WebFinger and DNS-SD in
> one specification. Why complicate matters unnecessarily?
>
> Particularly when, outside (apparently) some large corporations, DNS
> configuration is a far higher hurdle than adding something to the web root.
> If we struggle to get people to deploy these applications today, when
> mostly they just require uploading and connecting to a database... how much
> harder will it be when they also have to add complex TXT records to their
> DNS?
>