On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 5:15 PM, Henry H <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 1) John memorizes the SMS number for > each service and knows 55131 is > twitter.com and 64333 is foo.com
That only works if the SMS number can be considered a synonym for the "domain part" of the user's id and users have excellent memory... It won't work where you have a federated system or other aggregator that can forward messages from more than one domain. (e.g. A system might pass messages from both [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- the SMS number would be the same for both Susans and thus provides no help in disambiguation. > 2) The SMS message contains identification > of sender (e.g. nickname assigned earlier, > qualified domain name, etc) This issue, of course, is potential truncation as a result of expanding the identifier to provide disambiguation. It should be noted that there are issues with "icon based" solutions even on non-SMS channels. For very good reasons, modern web browsers and email systems allow users to turn off image display. In some cases it is to adapt to low bandwidth communications paths, in other situations, it is to avoid the security problems that have often been discovered in image rendering code. There are also questions of "morality" with folk who are easily offended by objectionable images. We should also consider accessibility issues: Not all users can view images and may prefer or need to use Text-to-speech interfaces to "read" displayed data. An additional issue with icon based systems is that they mean that the display format for a name is not the same as the input format. This means that you may be able to distinguish [EMAIL PROTECTED] from [EMAIL PROTECTED] based on icon, however, the information you use to distinguish them is not useful if you are attempting to send them a message. bob wyman
