[foaf-protocols] FoaF Update Protocol

[Henry Story]

On 5 Sep 2010, at 09:49, Daniël Bos wrote:

> Disclaimer:
> I haven't been on the mailing list for very long, so my apologies if
> this has been discussed before. It may also be too early to discuss
> this issue, I plan to write up a more detailed blog post which may
> then be used as future reference.

Welcome to the list !

> 
> Inception:
> When I read about the WebID+pop/smtp idea to create a WebID Mail
> stack, and especially after reading the RESTmail introduction by Paul
> Prescod, I was really excited and about to fire up my editor to see if
> I could pull something together to start experimenting with it. Just
> in time I realized it would be better to first spend some time with
> the idea and put some diagrams and flows on paper.

There are a few other options to your proposal that you may want to look
at. 

1. <keygen> 
   for creating and updating public keys I think having a keygen aware 
  service is the best method. This allows integration in the browser as shown
  by a couple of the videos such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iZPJBpI2Po
  See how http://foaf.me/ does it, or http://webid.myxwiki.org which allows you
  to have more than one key

2. pingback. That is a good way to let people know about friend requests or annotations.
  http://esw.w3.org/Pingback and is very simple to implement. Very close to Web2.0 way of thinking.

3. Atom or Web-DAV. Nice simple RESTful solutions, but they move all the logic to the
   client.

4. SPARQL Update - is probably the way to go in the longer term, but it requires the
  server to be a lot more aware.

Perhaps that will help you get going on the task you set out to do initially, namely an restmail+webid implementation :-)


Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/