Re: [Social] Fwd: GNU/social legacy

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 11 December 2012 17:32, Evan Prodromou <address@hidden> wrote:

On 12-12-11 05:30 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:

There are some such as facebook, tent.io, FOAF, indieweb whose primary focus is on http URIs.  This is the style favoured by Tim Berners-Lee and others. 

Also: it is intellectually dishonest to associate Facebook Open Graph URLs with "identity". Users never see those URLs. Users never interact with those URLs.

A distinction needs to be made between what the user thinks of their identity (which is normally just their name) and what the system thinks of as identity (which can be used eg as part of an API).  I'm not sure I would call this intellectually dishonest, but maybe we are talking about different things much like in MVC you talk about the "View" ie the User Interface, as distinct from the "Model", used on the back end.
 
I think part of the miscommunication arises when one person is discussing a user based interaction, and another is discussing a scalable architecture.  There can be no doubt facebook use the open graph extensively, even if it's hidden to an extent from the user.  Developers and other websites can use OGP quite effectively too.
 

There are two scalability problems with keying of email.  The first is that it was not designed to be dereferenced so there are various hacks being proposed at the IETF in order to address this. 

What's that got to do with scalability?

The main scalability issue is that, despite claims to the contrary, no system I've ever seen in the email only interoperates well with the http identity world ie The Web, in practice.  However the converse is not true.  For example you can log in quite easily to facebook via email or lookup friends, or even use someone's real name.

The vast majority of user accounts on the Web are tied to a hidden email address as the primary identity.

Also, this has nothing to do with scalability.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

So far, the hierarchical username + domain system of email has proved incredibly resilient and insanely scalable -- with the possible exception of the tightness around the limited number of TLDs, which makes getting yourfavoritename.com kind of expensive. That's something all DNS-based identities have problems with, however.

-Evan

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Evan Prodromou, CEO and Founder, StatusNet Inc.
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