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

[Petr Viktorin]

>> The fundamental problem, IMO, is that any fully qualified, unique ID
>> is just too long.
>
> I'd argue (and do, often!) that email addresses are fully qualified,
> unique IDs that are sufficiently short and also represent the "free"
> characteristics that we need in any sort of decentralized system.

By too long, I meant too long for casual convesation.
Nobody will tweet "Just had dinner with address@hidden".
We certainly do need global IDs, even with a solid nickname system,
and e-mail/Webfinger is probably the best choice for those.

> As an aside, you probably don't want to share nicknames, since someone
> might give their boss or someone they don't particularly like an
> unsavoury nickname, thinking it's private, but getting in trouble when
> it turns out it's not. Principle of least surprise.

I think that if you use the nickname in a public post, it should get
linked to the correct person, and the nickname itself should be
preserved. You could just as well say "My boss is an idiot" without
any markup; surely we won't try to prevent that?

In some communities you are only known by your nickname, and nobody
really cares about your real name: some forums, Boy scouts, etc. One
person might be known by different names in different communities.
Some nicknames are global (e-mail). Of the rest, some are tied to the
nicknamed person (first name), some are specific to a community (Boy
scout nickname), some are specific to the relationship (boss, or
"@sweetheart", doesn't that sound romantic?).
I sure would be surprised if I set those and they weren't shared.
(And yes, in all of these categories, there are reasons for secret
nicknames – people might want to hide their e-mail and real name,
Pirate bay username, or an insulting nickname for the boss.)

So maybe we don't want to share nicknames by default, but we want to
make it possible to do it. And the checkbox to enable it shouldn't be
buried.

> Nicknames are great as local "helpers", but when it comes to *sharing*
> identifiers across "communities" (e.g., from tweet.ie to identi.ca),
> nicknames break down.

If we consistently treat nicknames as something local to the person
who used them, and make them resolve to global IDs, they shouldn't
break down. After all, that (sans the resolution) is how nicknames
work in the real world: if someone, say, in a movie, says "I love you,
Fred", you know it's their Fred, not yours.
Of course this requires that each post has information about the
original poster, which pretty much requires that sharing a post with
all its (public) metadata is easier than copy-pasting just the text,
but those are good ideas anyway.