Re: Federated/Distributed @mentions

On 12/03/2014 05:35 PM, James M Snell wrote:
> One of the most common aspects of many social systems that we have not
> yet really discussed is the humble @mention. Currently, most of the
> popular social platforms support some form of @mention that is
> specific to their own platform. We can't, for instance, @mention a
> facebook account on twitter, etc.
For federation mechanism we have http//webmention.org as one of
candidates with open working implementations.


> 
> IBM's Connections product takes a step in the right direction using a
> specialized form of structured @mention and I know there have been
> some other informal attempts at getting something going on this. Given
> how fundamental @mentions are to most social platforms it would likely
> be worth the effort for the socialwg to look at this.
> 
> The way IBM Connections does it is:
> 
> "hey @{{urn:lsid:lconn.ibm.com:profiles.person:510b99c0-0101-102e-893f-f78755f7e0ed|@Amy
> Jones102}}"
> 
> The "urn:lsid:..." part is the users unique identifier within
> Connections. This could easily be replaced by an open identifier
> (http, email, acct, etc). The part after the | is what is actually
> rendered to the user. Connections renders this as a link and popup
> "business card" when the user hovers over the name.
> 
> While this works for Connections, the use of {{ }} is a bit
> problematic in general because those are also used for things like
> handlebar templates. Perhaps [ and ] would work better... e.g.
> 
> @[http://twitter.com/jasnell|jasnell] to @mention my twitter id
> @[http://facebook.com/jasnell|jasnell] to @mention my facebook id
> @[http://github.com/jasnell|jasnell] to @mention my github id, etc
> 
> We could allow the use of openid connect identifiers as well, although
> doing so would end up requiring the implementation to support
> discovery.
> 
> @[acct:jasnell@us.ibm.com|jasnell]
> 
> A similar mechanism can be used for distributed hash tagging.
> 
> #[https://twitter.com/hashtag/socialwg|socialwg]
Maybe we don't even need to agree on particular syntax? people could use
@ + ^ etc. If we would need I would include Markdown syntax for link in
our consideration. Especially with this new effort: http://commonmark.org/

[jasnell](acct:jasnell@us.ibm.com)

I would also see use cases for linking to someone silently and
requesting notification. I understand as:[to, bto, cc, bcc] supposed to
help with it?
http://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/#h4_audienceTargeting


> 
> These would obviously be intended for use within free-text type
> properties... for instance:
> 
> {
>   "@context": "http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
>   "@type": "Note",
>   "content": "This note mentions @[http://twitter.com/jasnell|jasnell]
> on twitter #[http://twitter.com/hashtag/socialwg|socialwg]"
> }
> 
> I note that the Twitter API takes the additional step of extracting
> these kinds of structured entities out of the text and including them
> in the JSON. We can do something similar using the AS2 "tag"
> property... e.g.
> 
> {
>   "@context": "http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
>   "@type": "Note",
>   "content": "This note mentions @[http://twitter.com/jasnell|jasnell]
> on twitter #[http://twitter.com/hashtag/socialwg|socialwg]",
>   "tag": [
>     {
>       "@type": "Mention",
>       "href": "http://twitter.com/jasnell",
>       "displayName": "jasnell"
>     },
>     {
>       "@type": "Tag",
>       "href": "http://twitter.com/hashtag/socialwg",
>       "displayName": "socialwg"
>     }
>   ]
> }
> 
> Thoughts?
I would require apps providing interface for direct human interaction to
extract to, bto, cc, bcc for JSON serialization, using whatever entry
method they want to implement ^ @ + ~ * cc: Counting on particular
markup in content doesn't sound convincing to me at this moment!

Received on Wednesday, 3 December 2014 19:14:00 UTC