Stream of Consciousness

Finally following up to a blog entry by John Beatty regarding a conversation he and I had back in June at Planetwork. I believe that John unintentionally mis-represented my comments when he wrote:

Fen also doesn’t really believe in the single, universal super-identifier that is being used in the e-names elevator pitch.

What I had said in our conversation was that I’m not a huge believer in the value of global e-names [sic] as the value of the network will be at the edges, and local i-names (the name we’re now using for these identifiers) will have as much or more value. E.g., I think it is more important that the people in my @idcommons*iname-hackers*bay-area*sunday-hikers community can know me as, simply, “fen” than someone I don’t know in some sub-community in China can reach me by typing in my global identifier “=fen“.

That said, I do think in the short term global i-names will be useful (as the infrastructure to handle searching and easy local community formation is not yet in place) and in the longer term, the vanity factor will be significant. Fact is, I plan to buy global i-names for my wife and son as I want the choice - and I know a good deal when I see it.

FOAF uses the mbox field as a primary key. Here’s a super-simple FOAF record:

<foaf:Person>
  <foaf:name>Fen Labalme</foaf:name>
  <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:fen@idcommons.net" />
  <foaf:nick >fen</foaf:nick>
  <foaf:workplacehomepage rdf:resource="http://fen.net/" />
  <foaf:depiction
    rdf:resource="http://www.fen.net/images/fen_200306_114x160.jpg" />
  <foaf:knows>
    <foaf:Person>
      <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:owen@idcommons.net" />
      <foaf:name>Owen Davis</foaf:name>
    </foaf:Person>
  </foaf:knows>
</foaf:Person>

Note that one thing being done to increase security is to us the SHA1 hash of the email address instead of the actual email address, so that connections can still be made without giving away a person’s actual email address. But this is only one level of indirection, as anyone who has a large address book (I have over 1000 mostly technology folk in my Solstice/Equinox list - I’m sure Marc Canter and Joi Ito have many more!) can easily map the SHA1 hashes to actual email addresses.

Other keys can be used by various aggregators and bots, but imagine if instead of putting all this data out publicly, the “mailto:” schema in the mbox field was replaced with “xri:” and pointed to an i-name, access to which was governed by a personal i-broker. This requires ZERO modification to the FOAF protocol while immediately offering the full capabilities of XRI/XDI, DataBrokers and Link Contracts (which, admittedly, doesn’t really exist except in theory, yet).

But it’s a compelling story!