Re: [Social-discuss] Protocol / Design Considerations.

[Petr Viktorin]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 00:04, Blaine Cook <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 16 March 2010 21:16, Melvin Carvalho <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>>> HTTP URLs don't work as addresses *for people*.
>>
>> Not sure on this one.  Something that twitter does well is addressable
>> profiles.
>
> Twitter addressable profiles aren't URLs; (statistically) no-one
> thinks of Twitter profiles as URLs, and Twitter very much would prefer
> if they didn't. Instead, Twitter uses identifiers that aren't even
> URIs - @name. Those identifiers aren't decentralized, they're not
> resolvable outside of the Twitter context, and most importantly they
> make sense to people.
>
> That said, they only sort-of make sense to people. Anyone with a
> common name will readily attest that they frequently get @name replies
> that are for other people with the same name.

The problem of good identifiers is unique to decentralized systems.
Indeed, it's the one area of the Web that's still fairly centralized –
you can't just grab a domain and use it.
We have to make this work well, and there aren't many good examples of
how to do it out there.
The fundamental problem, IMO, is that any fully qualified, unique ID
is just too long.

I would very much like to see some kind of local aliases. Here's the
idea (Concrete syntax/terminology might be different of course):
If I write "@fred", the software knows I want the Fred from my "friend list".
If I want to reply to someone I don't know, I can use a full URL.
One question is what happens if I know two (or zero) Freds. Does the
software make me choose one before posting? Does it go unresolved,
until I come in later and resolve it? Or do I need to assign explicit
unique nicknames to people to use this?
Another problem is sharing (reposting, retweeting). A solution here is
to let the full URL get embedded in the post, so anyone sharing it
wouldn't have to know this particular Fred. The string "@fred" itself
wouldn't be that much of a problem, as when someone sees the post is
from me they should know I'm talking about the Fred I know.

Obviously this needs a lot of careful thought, but if the goal is user
friendliness it's the way to go, IMO.