Microid mailing list

[Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter AT jabber.org>]

Forgive me for being dense, but the fact that I ask all these questions
will make it easier for me to write the spec. :-)

Evan Prodromou wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-28-11 at 14:00 -0700, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> 
>> But the way I understood it is that the microid says "this is fred at
>> delicious". [...]
> 
> Here's a counter-example (not (yet) implemented). I've worked on a lot
> of pages on Wikitravel. If I wanted to claim that I've worked on the
> London travel guide, I could point to the London page:
> 
>       http://wikitravel.org/en/London
> 
> That page could have a microid <meta> tag that says that Evan worked on
> this page. If I didn't work on the Paris travel guide, then this page:
> 
>       http://wikitravel.org/en/Paris
> 
> ...would _not_ have a microid for my identification.

Sure. But the fact that you worked on the London page but not the Paris
page is indicated by the presence of the microid in the London page but
not the Paris page. I don't see a need to have one microid at the London
page and (if you work on it) a different microid at the Paris page. And
I don't see a need for that because, as far as I can see, the microid is
used by wikitravel to say that this wikitravel content was worked on by
Evan in a generic fashion, not to say that "this content was worked on
by Evan and this content is about London" vs. "this content was worked
on by Evan and this content is about Paris", because we can tell the
difference between the content by going to the URLs.

>> It seems to me that what we care about [...]
> 
> I think we care about associating people with resources. I think making
> claims to user accounts on different services is a great use case, but
> it's definitely not the only one.

Let me see if I understand. Here is Fred's example:

> Now imagine I have two claimID-like services.  In one I wish
> to claim my general web reputation (so I would claim
> http://del.icio.us/fstutzman) and in the other I wanted to
> claim my facebook-specific reputation (so I would claim
> http://del.icio.us/fstutzman/facebook).  These are both
> valuable points of my reputation.

What are these claimID-like services? Do you have a different identity
at each one? Let's say you have these two provider URLs:

1. http://general.example.org/fred

2. http://facebook.example.net/fstutzman

So delicious mashes up the following to generate microids:

1. http://del.icio.us/ + http://general.example.org/fred

   microid: 9c55b9b46b3033908469c746c4bf0b826953eb07

2. http://del.icio.us/ + http://facebook.example.net/fstutzman

   microid: c5b54608ed5f76fa1573e818dfab9e1227109fec

Now delicious can plunk 9c55b9b46b3033908469c746c4bf0b826953eb07 in any
page that relates to your general web reputation (who cares what the URL
is?) and c5b54608ed5f76fa1573e818dfab9e1227109fec in any page that
relates to your facebook persona.

If the microid is different for every URL then I don't see how anyone is
going to usefully do things like spider all of delicious to find every
page that relates to your general web presence as opposed to your
facebook presence (or all the pages on wikitravel that Evan has edited
or whatever).

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
Jabber Software Foundation
http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml

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