Mozilla BrowserID

[SitG Admin]

At 8:47 PM -0700 7/18/11, Allen Tom wrote:
>Using the email address as the first class identifier is a good 
>idea, so +10000 for using email address as the one true identifier. 
>I also like how they have an interim solution for users whose email 
>provider doesn't support BrowserID.

Transition-only, meant to end up as an E-mail address?

Philosophically (and this is how I think of it, since I try to 
imagine the effect on users' minds to conceptualize their online 
activity in various ways), there is "push" and "pull". If the active 
party, the one forming intent and acting upon it, is a user, they 
"pull" the data in, making requests which third parties respond to. 
If the user's role is reduced to accepting or rejecting whatever any 
third party decides to "push" upon them, as a passive recipient, 
their ability to terminate undesirable interactions while continuing 
others is limited.

Users have different needs, and usually *both* needs, when it comes 
to these two. My personal preference is for the "browser" (as 
"pull"), and to avoid conflating the concept of a universal 
identifier with the idea that we must give others some shared way to 
contact us ("push"), but more deeply, I suspect that no identifier 
which is wholly one or the other will ever be completely suitable as 
a "one true identifier".

At 2:02 PM +0900 7/19/11, Nat Sakimura wrote:
>There has to be some ways of canonicalizing email address into a 
>non-re-assignable identifier.

There's always hashing, but then it doesn't make sense to humans.

-Shade