How exactly we namespace micro-blogging usernames was a topic Evan discussed at Bearhug Camp and unfortunately I wasn't able to be in attendance to throw in my 2 cents. But to me this is an extremely important issue that deserves discussion, so I'm bringing the debate here.
Here's the problem (as I see it): If microblogging/micromessaging/tweeting/whateveryouwanttocallit is going to truly be cross-platform, there needs to be a way to direct messages not only to users within your own platform (i.e. Twitter, Identi.ca, etc...) as well as direct messages to users on other platforms (like how email works). Also, when your message/tweet is sent to another platform and it has an @reply in it, how is that @reply portrayed on that other platform? Example: Currently there are Identi.ca users that make use of a bridge to relay their messages from Identi.ca to Twitter, and when those messages contain an @reply, those also get carried over to Twitter. That's fine & dandy until someone sends an @reply to identi.ca/bob who is different from twitter.com/bob, and twitter.com/bob starts getting all these tweets in his reply timeline that are not really supposed to be directed at him. The purist in me says that is a big issue that needs to be resolved before more people start doing the same thing (*cough* http://laconi.ca/trac/ticket/68) because it can have a detrimental effect on the experience for users on other systems. Unfortunately I don't remember all the options Evan had written on the whiteboard at Bearhug Camp, but here are some that I had thought of a few weeks back when this issue arose @identi.ca/derek @derek/identi.ca @derek::identi.ca @[EMAIL PROTECTED] @http://identi.ca/derek etc... You can see patterns develop, and really it just comes down to what symbols you want to use. So what are the similarities/differences between them? Well, all of them are made-up URI's aside from the ones that actually point to the user's true URI, @http://identi.ca/derek & @identi.ca/derek. As a client developer that has played with mixing twitter & identi.catimelines (unlike Twhirl for example which separates them into different windows) I've really thought about this issue, and the only one that really makes sense to me is the true URI. If micro-blogging proliferates as much as we hope, multi-platform clients are going to be fed many @reply messages directed at users that aren't hosted on their platform. If I get a message that contains @derek/twitarmy in my client, I would have have zero idea where to actually point for that user's URI or what platform "twitarmy" even is unless I rely on a list of all the micro-blogging platforms out there (bad idea). However, if my client gets a message that contains @ army.twit.tv/derek and I have never heard of "army.twit.tv", it's no big deal because I have a great idea of where to point my user to in order to find more information about "derek". Platforms and/or clients can also of course hide the service domain if it doesn't make sense to display that info (i.e. if the recipient is on the same domain as the sender). Just think about how different the internet would be if email addresses weren't "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" but instead would be "gmail.com/drgath". That would in fact be your true URI where people could send messages to via email, could visit via HTTP to see who that person is, could chat with that person via XMPP by adding that user to their buddy list, could be used as an OpenID, etc... Social networking would have evolved much differently and there may not be the need for developer unfriendly silos like MySpace and Facebook. Social networking could be... *gasp*... distributed! We can finally use a "Universal Resource Identifier" to actually be a universal way to identify and access a person. Now, adding all of the additional modules to handle that functionality may or may not ever happen, but the potential is at least there. Back to Bearhug Camp... I didn't catch all of the conversation surrounding this namespacing/routing issue and where the conversation left off. But I did see Evan erase the "@http://identi.ca/username"; option and said he was comfortable with the other approaches. It was one of those slow-motion "nooooooo!" moments and I wanted to raise the issue to see what other developers thought. Am I crazy?
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