There's a particular discovery problem for open and distributed protocols such as
OpenID,
OAuth,
Portable Contacts,
Activity Streams, and
OpenSocial. It seems like a trivial problem, but it's one of the stumbling blocks that slows mass adoption. We need to fix it. So first, I'm going to name it:
The Personal Web Discovery Problem: Given a person, how do I find out what services that person uses?
This does sound trivial, doesn't it? And it is easy as long as you're service-centric; if you're building on top of social network X, there is no discovery problem, or at least only a trivial one that can be solved with proprietary APIs. But what if you want to build on top of X,Y, and Z? Well, you write code to make the user log in to each one so you can call those proprietary APIs... which means the user has to tell you their identity (and probably password) on each one... and the user has already clicked the Back button because this is complicated and annoying.
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Its weird, I accessed Jason's weblog the other day when I first read this post, but now I keep getting an error message, no matter what link I use... even through the search engines. Is it just me? All of my other links are okay.
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