Comments on: Don’t ask me who I am

By: Wohnaccessoires

Wohnaccessoires — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 22:04:59 +0000

But you’re forgetting that a lot of people, myself included, like to represent themselves in different ways on different sites. This would only really be useful as a starting point, I wouldn’t want all my profiles to be identical. I don’t use the same info for business (linkedin), school (facebook), friends from home (myspace), people i know from various music forums (last.fm) etc.

By: 0xDECAFBAD » meetro asks myspace who i am

0xDECAFBAD » meetro asks myspace who i am — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 16:43:43 +0000

[...] meetro asks myspace who i am Now, this is what I’m talking about. It’s just too bad they’re only importing from Myspace. And that it didn’t apparently work when I tried it. [...]

By: Mike Macgirvin

Mike Macgirvin — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 20:38:14 +0000

I agree with Steve. Who am I? It depends. Who are you, and based on that - what do I wish you to know about me? Who are my friends? Same thing. Even if I wanted to divulge them, I then need to respect their privacy wishes and decide if they want you to know that they are a friend of mine (or not) and how they came to be tagged as friends. A web service which tries to consolidate all of this info is presented with too many privacy conflicts to ever get it right (IMAO). I can recall this concept being tried by a hundred different companies (not to mention open source projects) going back to the early 90's. It was never an issue of technology. The hurdles are primarily social and revolve around trust and privacy - and delegation of these rights to third parties in language even my mother would understand.

By: Tantek Çelik

Tantek Çelik — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 07:22:55 +0000

Indeed Les, this is exactly what hCard solves on the Web with the minimum of duplication of data into hidden places and mimetype hackery/configuration (problems of the other approaches mentioned).

You can either use a 3rd party service like claimID as mentioned to claim your various profiles on the Web, or you can simply continue to publish your profile information on your about or author page, simply add just a bit of hCard markup, and use XFN Identity Consolidation (rel="me") to turn your about page into your consolidated identity hub.

While services will undoubtedly continue to ask you a hundred profile questions, the better ones will do something as simple as use the simple open source hKit Microformats Toolkit by Drew McLellan to let you simply enter your hCard URL and fill out all the questions automatically from that.

And the best services will help you, the user, keep your profile as portable as you would like it, by marking it up with hCard as well. Already, profiles on numerous services, in addition to the abovementioned claimID, like Flickr and Technorati are marked up with hCard and thus ready for reuse with services that use hKit.

Finally, some have brought up "extensibility" as something that is desirable yet recent lessons have taught us that in terms of standards and interoperability, the opposite is true. The more well-defined not-infinitely-extensible a standard is, the sooner implementers know they are "done" implementing it (interoperably even!), and the less chance there is of a zillion non-interoperable extensions randomly emerging (i.e. Tower of Babel problem) which then cause headaches not only for all implementers, but users as well as the users then have to contend with their data not quite working interoperably across all the different services that all support slightly different sets of incompatible/non-interoperable extensions.

By: Bob Aman

Bob Aman — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 22:24:28 +0000

Danny, I am actually aware of all of those acronyms, however, I completely disagree on the point about FOAF's expressivity relying mainly on RDF. I would contend that FOAF's expressivity actually relies far, far more, simply on XML's ability to namespace things, and thus allow for extensions. Something that a simple XML dialect would also have, but with the added bonus of an infinitely simpler parser, fewer confused programmers, and quite a bit less bandwidth consumed.

By: 0xDECAFBAD » what use claimid?

0xDECAFBAD » what use claimid? — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 19:04:50 +0000

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By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 17:37:36 +0000

But you're forgetting that a lot of people, myself included, like to represent themselves in different ways on different sites. This would only really be useful as a starting point, I wouldn't want all my profiles to be identical. I don't use the same info for business (linkedin), school (facebook), friends from home (myspace), people i know from various music forums (last.fm) etc.

By: Danny

Danny — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 09:01:02 +0000

Right on Les! There are two issues, identification/authentication (hard, but the outlook looks promising) and personal profile/description (easier, already pretty much solved by the tech you mention). Hopefully the two should be joined up before long...

re. Bob's comment: "XFN and hCard are good for what they are, but they’re still a far cry from the expressivity of FOAF.". Indeed, they also help considerably with the problem of expressing this kind of machine-readable data in HTML. But "FOAF would be a lot more useful if it didn’t rely on RDF." - the power, the expressivity of FOAF comes from RDF.

I suspect Bob (like Mad William) may be assuming RDF (including FOAF) has to mean RDF/XML. But RDF is a model, it doesn't have to serialize to XML, there are other formats - including HTML (via eRDF). Note too that microformats like XFN and hCard can be interpreted as RDF (including FOAF terms as appropriate) with GRDDL.

(Incidentally I got to this post before even looking in my personal agg via Marc Canter's on Planet Web 2.0)

By: Bob Aman

Bob Aman — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 23:34:44 +0000

I'm a minor fan of claimID, but I much prefer hardcore decentralization. FOAF would be a lot more useful if it didn't rely on RDF. XFN and hCard are good for what they are, but they're still a far cry from the expressivity of FOAF. Sadly, there's no good format that solves a sufficiently large number of the problems in this space (that doesn't carry the RDF baggage anyways).

By: Geof F. Morris's Indiana Jones School of Management

Geof F. Morris's Indiana Jones School of Management — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 18:02:11 +0000

claimID...

I’m with Les, and so since he’s jumped after claimID, I will, too! That sidebar on GFMorris.net just gets longer and longer …

......

By: 0xDECAFBAD » see also

0xDECAFBAD » see also — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 17:11:49 +0000

[...] Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. « no amazon iframes forme [...]

By: Ian Bicking

Ian Bicking — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 16:51:10 +0000

http://videntity.org/ seems to be offering a bunch of these things together; more as an example, since anyone offering the same information would be a peer.

By: Jim Renaud

Jim Renaud — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 16:48:39 +0000

Can't we just use the information the NSA is compiling for us? This way we don't even have to enter it ourselves!

By: Mad William Flint

Mad William Flint — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 14:51:47 +0000

Nice. I'll concede the point to hCard.

By: Terrell Russell

Terrell Russell — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 13:45:20 +0000

claimID, claimID!

http://claimID.com

Give it a whirl and see if you like what we're doing. Point to it. Point from it. Keep it in one place.

Terrell
http://claimID.com/terrell