Re: Question: User Story -- Bootstrapping Facebook

On 10 Feb 2011, at 13:10, Nathan wrote:
> Henry Story wrote:
>> On 10 Feb 2011, at 11:08, László Török wrote:
>>> Ultimately, there are three questions for facebook here:
>>> - would you ever allow users to sign in to facebook using webid(s)?
>>> - would you ever allow people to use their facebook uri as a webid?
>>> - would you publish users profile data (subject to their privacy settings) in a machine readable way, at the profile uri?
>>> 
>>> Probably implicit, but: Would Fb let me publich my public key as part of my profile? Could that be made public (without signing in)? 
>> None of these are technical questions. I don't see how we can answer them here. 
> 
> They're examples of questions we need to be asking to ensure we make the right design and technical decisions.

How are questions as general as these, and phrased in terms of the intent of a particular actor going to help us make the right technical decisions? Would they not first have to understand WebId enough before they even answer those questions? And when they do understand it, the issues they have may be non issues that we can easily solve. 

So those are questions for Facebook perhaps. But they cannot be questions for us.

> 
> The primary usage of identification, auth* and profiles on the web is in the social sector, facebook are the biggest player in that sector.

I think we all realise that. But we are not even hearing Facebook speak in this thread, just someone's thoughts about problems Facebook may have at some point in the future. So we are dealing with completely hypothetical worries that we cannot answer. 

> 
> To ask facebook, and the other key players in the scoial space, about their design, deployment and compatibility considerations makes perfect sense, in fact I'd say we'd be mad not to.

Well indeed that was one of my earlier points. We should consult many of the players and see what technical problems they do actually have, and try to either help them, or use the feedback to improve the protocol. For example the status.net people who have already deployed foaf, are open source  and have a distributed setup would seem to be a much better place to try things out. Others I can think of are Elgg, the Federated Social Web members, the Diaspora community, ...

> If we can't get the answers to these questions here, then we can't make what the web needs.

But let us not forget the people who have already implemented WeBID. It is through feedback done with real implementations that we have evolved to this stage. Let us continue that work. 

Henry

> 
> Best,
> 
> Nathan

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Thursday, 10 February 2011 12:49:14 UTC