Microid mailing list

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

Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> Evan Prodromou wrote:
>> On Tue, 2006-28-11 at 14:00 -0700, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>>
>> 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).

Really I do get it. URIs are opaque. If a certain provider wants to
assign a general meaning to microids at that provider's service, then
they can normalize down to <http://del.icio.us/> in generating microids.
But if another provider doesn't want to truncate down to the authority
component they don't have to -- it won't be possible to use microids at
that provider's service in the same general way, but they may have more
particular uses in mind.

Let a thousand flowers bloom!

/psa

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