The "You Know Me" Button

Mon, Jan 20, 2003; by Dave Winer.

A simple addition to discussion group software makes it easy for a user to go to one place to monitor all conversations he or she is part of. As an extra bonus, it forms the basis for global identity. All that's needed is one new user interface concept, to be supported by most or all discussion group applications, and a simple protocol.

A new button 

Consider the place where a discussion group asks for your personal information. Three pieces of data are commonly requested: your name, email address, and the URL of your weblog.

Add an additional element, a badge-sized image that says You Know Me. When the user clicks on it, a new page is displayed by the discussion group software, asking the user for two pieces of information: the domain name of a server responding to the protocol described below, and the user's ID with that server.

When the user clicks on the Submit button, the form is processed by a CGI running on the identity server machine. It receives the user's ID and several hidden fields that tell the identity server about the discussion group server, including the URL of the page to redirect to for the user to post the message he or she wanted to post when the process started. The identity server processes the claim, opens the page on the DG server, with a parameter containing the user's ID, which the DG server stores in its database, and returns a cookie to the user linked to the database record.

A new Web app 

The identity server would receive a ping from each compatible discussion group you were part of when you create a new message. This would be added to a list of messages, each with a checkbox that allows you to delete messages you no longer wish to monitor.

This Web app of course could be an outliner, or something like NewzCrawler, it doesn't actually have to display in HTML. It just gives you a single place to conveniently monitor all your conversations.

The app must be reachable via XML-RPC, and must not be behind a firewall or NAT. In other words it must be a full peer.

Status 

1/20/03; 6:17:10 AM by DW -- I've deliberately not fully fleshed this out so that people won't start implementing immediately. I want to know if you see any big glaring holes. I'm not sure what the next step is. Let's see what happens.