Re: [Social-discuss] What should GNU social be?

[Hellekin O. Wolf]

On Mon, Mar 08, 2010 at 04:40:29PM +0100, Melvin Carvalho wrote: 
> 
> Thanks for the pointer.  You mention global stability, do the users in the
> psych system have a global identity?  XMPP/JID kind of is one, but they're
> not easy to dereference.  OpenID is easy to dereference, but not so easy to
> get at more data, after that.  I think to be global you need identifiers
> capable of being global, else you're inventing yet another protocol, that
> everyone else has to build a bridge to.
>
*** I mentioned scalability, but yes, identifiers in PSYC are URI (or
rather Uniform *Name* Identifier, for humans are not only resources).

The PSYC team makes a lot of efforts to integrate as many standards as
possible. For example, they recently integrated OAuth. The user
profile is made up from various conventions (see
http://about.psyc.eu/Profile).

I'm not sure how to respond to the dereferencing question. URIs seem
pretty much global to me. Maybe TG could chime in. Let's Cc him.

The UNI ("uniform") takes the following forms:

<proto>://<hostname>[:<port>[<transport>]]/<type><name>[#<channel]

<proto> is psyc. For other protocols, see below.
<hostname> is an FQDN or IP address.
<port> is optional and defaults to 4404
<transport> is optional and can be c for TCP circuit (the default), d
for UDP datagrams, or s for a secure TCP circuit (e.g. using STARTTLS).
<type> can be ~ for a user, @ for a room or $ for a service.
<name> is the entity name (see examples below).
<channel> indicates a subset of the resources, as anchors for URLs or
resources for JIDs.

Examples:

I am psyc://cepheide.org/~hellekin
Psyced automatically maps this to a JID and an IRC name, and an email
(although the email goes through Postfix and not Psyced).

JID: xmpp:address@hidden
IRC: irc://cepheide.org/~hellekin (although the canonical way would be
irc://cepheide.org/hellekin?isnick)
etc.

For a room, the mapping is a bit different: psyc://cepheide.org/@room
is xmpp:address@hidden

cf. http://cepheide.org:4484/~hellekin which is the public profile of
my UNI. My "friends" can access to more information, such as my public
keys, email, favorite music, etc. (note that if the server runs on
port 80, you have a perfect translation from psyc UNIs to http URLs)

==
hk