Fwd: Federation protocols

On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 4:36 PM, Michał 'rysiek' Woźniak
<rysiek@fwioo.pl> wrote:
> And I do believe e-mail-like UIDs are better, they clearly mark the place
> where the (nick)name ends and provider/server name begins. Bu that's just me.

UID are used opaquely for all practical purposes. There is no need to
demarcate the nick from the provider/server. The reason things like
webfinger need this "demarcation" in the first place is because you
cannot apply HTTP verbs to email "like" labels and need to extract the
host from it to do so. The only valid reason I've seen for email based
UIDs is that of usability (users are confused by URLs but are very
familiar with email addresses) but this ignores the fact that most of
the popular social networks started out from a small base of early
adopters (a few years ago the same type of people would have
complained about usability, if they were told that Twitter used
special syntax for things that are otherwise presented as user
interface elements (reply-to, cc, mention, tags). Solve a problem, the
network effect will take care of the rest.

We could go on :) but this highlights another aspect of the problem,
one that the indieweb folks have right IMO: Base standards/protocols
on very concrete personal use cases and not subjective preferences or
the vague/generic needs of some large enterprise [1]. This approach
has already yielded a federated comment thread across 7 different
personal publishing systems [2] (and growing) using very simple
building blocks [3] like WebMention [4] and mciroformats [5].


1. http://indiewebcamp.com/principles
2. http://eschnou.com/entry/testing-indieweb-federation-with-waterpigscouk-aaronpareckicom-and--62-24908.html
3. http://indiewebcamp.com/comments
4. http://indiewebcamp.com/webmention
5. http://microformats.org/

--
Sandeep Shetty
Founder, Simpthings
http://simpthings.com/
http://sandeep.shetty.in/p/about.html

Received on Friday, 31 May 2013 12:33:51 UTC