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Like Gravatar but for everything, not just avatars. Gravatar is a service, where you save your avatar. Websites such as StackOverflow can connect to Gravatar an
by RivieraKid 12y ago
Like Gravatar but for everything, not just avatars. Gravatar is a service, where you save your avatar. Websites such as StackOverflow can connect to Gravatar and retrieve your avatar from there. So when you decide to change your avatar, you do it in one place.
On a more abstract level, the problem here is that people and organizations often create some data and basically Ctrl+C Ctrl+V it to different services. Couple of examples:
- RSS subscriptions. If I want to try a new reader, I have to export subscriptions from my current reader and import it to the new one.
- Calendar events. Same problem. Yes, some services can sync with each other but it's a messy situation. Calendar apps must separately implement sync with several calendar services.
- Whenever I want to buy something from a new eshop, I need to enter my email and address.
- Restaurants publish their location, opening hours or photos on Yelp, Google Maps and others. When opening hours change, they need to separately update every service.
- Public transport operators send their timetables to Google and other services.
The solution I suggest is to store this data at the source. People and organizations would have something that's sort of similar to Dropbox, let's call it databox. You have a databox url, such as databox.org/1. Your avatar is available at databox.org/1/avatar. Your RSS subscriptions are at databox.org/1/rss/subscriptions. Opening hours of some company are inside a JSON that's on databox.org/2/restaurants.
The databox URL also serves as a login. So the workflow when trying a new RSS reader is like this. 1) You click on "register". 2) Enter your databox URL. 3) The reader requests a read and write permission to your RSS data. 4) You allow it and the reader fetches your subscriptions.
There are some standardized "subdirectories" (e.g. /rss, /calendar, /tasks) but anyone can create a new standard. For example, a bunch of Linux distributions can decide they will save desktop background and other desktop settings to /linux-desktop.
- et1337 12y agoSounds great, if you can hurdle the main obstacle every standard faces. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ :)
- RivieraKid 12y agoI had "inb4 the xkcd joke" in the comment but deleted it :) I wish Mozilla would create something like this, they have the power to push it.
- mhomde 12y agoEver heard about Microsoft's Hailstorm and the backlash that followed? :) For the record I think it's a good idea if it can be standardized and federated so you can choose and move between providers
- RivieraKid 12y agoNever heard of it :) Yes, ideally this would be an open standard and you should be able to run this on your server. Another thing I didn't mention was that for better privacy: the service should receive some autogenerated alias of databox.org/1, e.g. databox.org/1a4b2f4.
- namuol 12y agoSeems like it would be very difficult to standardize so many different types of data...
- fiatjaf 12y agohttp://schema.org/CreativeWork http://schema.org/CreativeWork
- shiggerino 12y agoThe W3C sort of had a solution with the semantic web, too bad nobody cared about the semantic web.
- fiatjaf 12y agoSome people care. And anybody implementing something like the suggested idea here should enable both hosted "preferences" and the capability of just being a hub for these same "preferences" hosted in external sites. Here's a solution that is like Gravatar, but for microformatted data in each people's own websites: http://webvatar.com/ http://webvatar.com/
- akshatpradhan 12y agoI personally think the semantic web was a solution in search of a problem. People weren't concerned about ontology and mappings. They were concerned with making the web more approachable. I think, therefore, money was invested into Mobile Apps / JS frameworks instead of tools for semantic web.
- shiggerino 12y agoI think it grew out of very much the same idealism that still drives Ted Nelson to this date. I guess to unify all of human knowledge to reach a higher form of understanding just isn't on most people's mind. Not even those whose day job it is to do just that, as is my experience from dabbling in academic publishing. This reminds me of an old blog post, Charles’ Rules of Argument [1]: “5. DO NOT argue with Lisp programmers, believers in the Semantic Web, or furries” 1. http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/03/21/charles_rules_of_argument/ http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/03/21/charles_rules_of_arg...
- fiatjaf 12y agoI think there could be a service like this, but that relied on the already standardized types of data and categories such as schema.org. The service could work like a hub, parsing private addresses people where indie-people would host their own preferences (for example, their own websites) and giving this data to external services; and, for common people, the website would host the data for them, also in a microformatted way (so other hubs and parsers could grab data from it).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- grey-area 12y agoSounds a bit like camilstore - https://camlistore.org https://camlistore.org