Re: [Social-discuss] Yet another idea on a free social network

[Lucas Stadler]

> > The last basic data type is also the most important. It contains
> > the definition of the information about a particular persons. I
> > call this an 'identity'. The minimal information that is required
> > to be part of the idea, is a foaf:Person definition with a public
> > key defined in it (WOT - Web of Trust). As I thought that a user
> > should only make availlable what he/she wants, one can also decide
> > to encrypt part of the identity and therefor restrict access to
> > a group. (Again, more on this (the groups) later.)
> 
> Have you looked at foaf+ssl?
> http://esw.w3.org/Foaf%2Bssl/FAQ
> 
> Henry
Actually I did have a look at it, but I do not know if it is good to
require all users having to have an URI, because you either need to
own a domain or find some kind person to give a subdomain or whatever
to you. And if one would use an URI such as http://facebook.com/~me 
or something like this, we would end up depending on them anyway.
Is this view correct or somehow ... wrong?

I know had a further look at it and it seems that one needs to have a
web server to use it. At least that is what I guessed from [1]. But I
think that it should be possible to retrieve such a document just by
establishing a connection through TCP or whatever direct connection
one could have between two nodes and encrypt that with SSL.
Personally, I do prefer this method, as the emphasis on the idea was
that of p2p connections. Nonetheless, I think that it is important to
support both, even if the latter would require a server and a domain.

[1] http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/foaf_ssl_adding_security_to