August 2009 Archives

What a life

An unfortunate choice of phrase for those with a purile mind, but an interesting project that is (one of many) trying to figure out how we represent information about people on the internets.

A facebook profile is all good … until you don’t want to use facebook (or they go broke, or they turn evil, or …). See also all the other social sites.

Part of the problem is that people want to have different information (a consultant wants his phone number public, my granny likely does not).

Part is how we format this information, is a salutation (mr, mrs, ms, dr, etc.) required or not? In some cultures it (sort, socially) is. Sometimes not.

How do we build a system that works for everyone, but is controlled by no one party? The web, for what it’s worth, is a great prototypical example of such a solution.

Email is opt-out : anyone can send you a message if they have your email address. Hence spam. Hence unexpected emails from long lost friends/family.

Twitter, facebook et al, are opt-in : you won’t get a message until someone “friends” you, so less spam. (Incidentally, there is nothing technical stopping you rejecting all emails from people you haven’t previously “allowed” … it’s just nobody does this … it’s socially “not the norm”).

I don’t know how well the webfinger project will do - likely not very. Not because of the technology (this is primarily a social problem of convention and standards), but because it will never get enough critical mass in the wider population because there isn’t a reason for any larger, powerful organisation to push it into the mainstream.

But, if it did, there are two out-comes I personally would dearly love to see:

Let me write a (snail) mail letter, put an email address on the front, and have the postal service deliver it to the (current) preferred physical address the email addresses owner has currently “on file”. Yes, I know there are lots of interesting questions this throws up … that is half the point/problem to this wider concept ….

and

Let me type an email address into my phone, rather than a phone number, then place the call. I know you can do something with Skype, but I cannot use a skype username to call someone on a payphone or (generally) a mobile or landline phone.

I know - these aren’t actually technically very hard to achieve.

This isn’t a technical problem. It’s a social (convention) one. As a broader society we have to collectively choose that we want this to happen.

And herding cats is hard.