On 11 December 2012 17:32, Evan Prodromou
<address@hidden> wrote:
On 12-12-11 05:30 AM, Melvin Carvalho
wrote:
There are some such as facebook,
tent.io, FOAF, indieweb whose
primary focus is on http URIs. This is the style favoured by
Tim Berners-Lee and others.
Also: it is intellectually dishonest to associate Facebook Open
Graph URLs with "identity". Users never see those URLs. Users never
interact with those URLs.
There are two scalability problems with keying of email.
The first is that it was not designed to be dereferenced so
there are various hacks being proposed at the IETF in order to
address this.
What's that got to do with scalability?
HTTP URIs are designed to scale massively and have a strong track record in doing so. The key to this is the dereference function of the URI (which is a pointer), namely HTTP GET. It means you can very easily discover more information and "follow your nose" to more links. This means every kind of website is interoperable with every other via the simplicity of a hyperlink, which you can seamlessly click through.
Furthermore, it's not just HTTP GET. You can use HTTP POST to send a payload from one HTTP URI to another. This enables both read and write operations in a distributed way. There is a whole bunch more robustness built in to the protocol, such as REST, CDNs, Status Codes, PUT/PATCH and much more. That HTTP scales is really a credit to a brilliant design that makes life very easy.
The main scalability issue is that, despite claims to the
contrary, no system I've ever seen in the email only
interoperates well with the http identity world ie The Web, in
practice. However the converse is not true. For example you
can log in quite easily to facebook via email or lookup
friends, or even use someone's real name.
The vast majority of user accounts on the Web are tied to a hidden
email address as the primary identity.
Also, this has nothing to do with scalability.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
So far, the hierarchical username + domain system of email has
proved incredibly resilient and insanely scalable -- with the
possible exception of the tightness around the limited number of
TLDs, which makes getting
yourfavoritename.com kind of expensive.
That's something all DNS-based identities have problems with,
however.
I appreciate your world view. I would be very happy if there were efforts from OStatus based systems to talk to web based systems based off HTTP URIs. If efforts were made in the OStatus ecosystem to talk to heterogeneous systems outside of itself, with evidence efforts made to of interop, I would happily change my view. But in the years that I've followed, this has not happened, and I dont expect that to change.
-Evan
--
Evan Prodromou, CEO and Founder, StatusNet Inc.
1124 rue Marie-Anne Est #32, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H2J 2B7
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