On Wed Jul 30 20:44:18 2008, Bob Wyman wrote:
On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 2:56 PM, anders conbere
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm not sure this is necessary. Or at least I don't see much
> of a difference between a service that aliases your name
> "Anders Conbere" to your email address "[EMAIL PROTECTED]".
Imagine that you're using a federated system like Identi.ca rather
than a
walled-garden system like Twitter. Now, imagine that you subscribe
to two
different people: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] (two
people, same
local name). Given this, what would a message look like if it is
delivered
to you via SMS? In that case, the alias "anders" wouldn't do you
any good
since you wouldn't know *which* anders was responsible for the
message. Your
SMS server would be forced to expand the alias out to include the
domain in
order to allow you to show you who sent the message. But, in doing
so, it
would lengthen the message and might, therefore, result in the
message
growing to more than the maximum number of characters for an SMS
message...
So, your SMS system might have to cut off the end of the message
and thus,
potentially lose important information.
I agree it sucks, but I'm not convinced that it needs to be broken in
the way you suggest.
Instead, you enter @anders into the interface at foo.com.
foo.com knows you mean [EMAIL PROTECTED], because it's unqualified.
foo.com tells me @aFoo, because it happens to know that I have
expressed an interest in referring to [EMAIL PROTECTED] as @aFoo.
I reply to @aFoo, and the reply goes to
Model, then interface - the Model is that names are qualified by some
namespace, but that does not follow that the sole Interface
technique allowable is to mandate that qualification on the user.
XMPP already has a concept of nicknames that works well for this kind
of case, and I think that's what we want to be using here.
What I do think is important is to move away from the relative
free-form of profile URLs that Laconica and Twitter are using, and
move toward a qualification based on domain name, so we really can
say "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" where the interface demands, instead of
"http://foo.com/anders"; - that means we'd need to agree on the syntax
of names, too.
Dave.
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