Re: Registration of acct: as a URI scheme has been requested

Hi Nathan,

On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Nathan <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:
> Each service I can think of, has a stable (non-URI) identifier for user
> accounts, from google through twitter, IMO those should be used, not these
> fragile email addresses with a new scheme bolted on the front to try and
> make it identify something it doesn't.

It's a premise of webfinger that we resolve a human-memorable string
of the form 'user@host' to accounts.

You have other options, like nascar and/or teaching your users to
remember http end-points. Another popular way to find people on the
web (but unfortunately centralized and not deterministic in its
results) is to do a free text search for first name + last name, then
click on one of the photos. This is how most friend requests inside
most silos work. Or you could identify users by using client-side
certificates on the devices they connect with (or some other
per-device fingerprinting).

If using 'user@host' strings doesn't appeal to you, then what you're
saying is you don't want to use webfinger. That's fine, nobody is
forcing you to. But for us, it is working the way we want it to work.


Cheers,
Michiel