[JDEV] jabber/im application idea

[Nigel Kerr]

hi Sebastiaan, hi all,

Quoth "Sebastiaan 'CBAS' Deckers" <cbas at screaming3d.com>:

> Hi,
>
> Would that be like a message board that attaches itself to websites?
> (perhaps visualized with a browser plugin)

this could certainly be one usage scenario of the kind of annotations
i'm thinking of, but i wouldn't really want to necessarily tie
"display of this URL" and "display of annotations about this URL"
together in the way i think you're suggesting.

with respect to your thoughts on carp below, i don't envisage it
needing ever to be so heavy-weight as to need distributed caches.  i
imagine only relatively small groups of people ever being subscribed
to each other's "annotations", and that the "cache hit" rate being
vanishingly small.  do you think that such a usage (annotations about
anything you can put an identifier to) would have requirements of
scale like that?  maybe i've misunderstood?

but then again, there hasn't been a good, widely used application of
this kind of "annotations" thing, so perhaps given a well-thought-out
tool for it, the actual users would get other ideas about how to put
it to use...  

an example of what i don't want: a while back, a company then known as
essential surfing gear had what amounted to a set of applets that were
always with you in your web browser.  one of them was a little
annotater: if you had that applet, and you happened to be looking at a
URL that the central server had an annotation for, you got to see it.
i'd like to allow any size of messagable entity to be able to receive
and respond to queries like this (if they want...) just as a jabber
message, not bound to particular software or service infrastructure.

i guess i want to ask if this goal is philosophically in jabber or
somewhere else?  or have i missed some things about jabber?  any and
all thoughts welcomed!

cheers,
nigel

> Perhaps you should take a look at projects like Microsoft's CARP to see what
> the best way is to distribute the comments in a Jabber P2P environment.
> Also, some websites put sensitive information in the URL (using GET HTTP
> requests to retrieve the information), so I think it would be best to hash
> the URL's and distribute the comments based on that hash. (storing the
> actual URL doesn't seem necessary because we already know it and it would
> usually increase the data compared to a 160 bit hash)
>
> CARP:
> http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/archive/proxy/prxcarp.asp
> The OHAHA P2P filesharing network use(d) a protocol bases on the same
> pronciples but the project get janked, I think. (the website turned into
> some sort of Christmas card)
>
> I'm not very knowledgable of database techniques or other load-balancing
> mechanisms but CARP seems like a good solution to this particular
> application.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Sebastiaan
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Nigel Kerr" <nigelk at umich.edu>
> To: <jdev at jabber.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 3:38 PM
> Subject: [JDEV] jabber/im application idea
>
>
>>
>> good folk,
>>
>> after lurking a bit and waddling through the documentation, i have a
>> couple of thoughts i'd appreciate comments on, having to do with what
>> i'd like to use jabber for:
>>
>> i've always wanted something i'll loosely call "annotations on the
>> web", a means by which i and other users can create annotations for
>> different URLs, and be able to share these annotations amongst
>> ourselves.  there have been a variety of different approaches to this,
>> but i haven't yet encountered one that was satisfying: they almost all
>> usually necessarily involve a central annotations storage server for
>> all the annotations made by that system, and some kind of helper
>> application or applet, maybe even actual page re-writing.  this has
>> always struck me as too heavy weight, and dependent on remote services
>> for storage as well as communication.
>>
>> a little while ago, after i'd been using instant messaging for work a
>> while, it occured to me that the IM/p2p-ish model might be a better
>> place for this kind of annotations: i for one really only want to
>> check on annotations made by people or orgs that i actually know
>> (read: in my roster).  that could be my acquaintances, it could be the
>> collected annotations of a scholarly society i belong to, a listserv
>> i'm on, what have you.
>>
>> from my reading of the docs on the protocol (and please to make
>> corrections if i am off base here, or if this might be differently
>> stated), we might imagine annotations conversations like this in
>> jabber:
>>
>>     query:
>>
>>         <iq type="get" to="..." from="...">
>>           <query type="jabber:iq:annotation">
>>             <annotation type="uri-exact"
>>                         value="http://some.where.com/over/the/rainbow/"/>
>>           </query>
>>         </iq>
>>
>>     and response:
>>
>>         <iq type="result" to="..." from="...">
>>           <query type="jabber:iq:annotation">
>>             <annotation type="uri-exact"
>>                         value="http://some.where.com/over/the/rainbow/">
>>               <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
>>                  <!-- ... some xhtml-basic content,
>>                           deathless prose, no doubt ... -->
>>               </html>
>>             </annotation>
>>           </query>
>>         </iq>
>>
>>     where we can imagine query types of at least things like
>>     'uri-exact', 'uri-prefix', 'domain', and even other things like
>>     ISSN/ISBN or DOI or SICI.
>>
>> one could certainly send and reply to such messages right now by hand
>> in jabber.  what would be more interesting is for a jabber client to
>> receive such a query, and look in whatever content store of
>> annotations were available, and respond automatically (assuming that
>> identities and subscription rights all permitted, natch...).  so, in
>> my jabber client, i would choose an option like "see if anyone in my
>> roster has an annotation for *this*", and then results would come back
>> if there were any.
>>
>> behind that scenario are myriad implementational details.  i think
>> that this does generalize from just annotations to anything that you'd
>> want to share amongst acquaintances and grows over time, and probably
>> generalizes further than that.
>>
>> is anyone working on or know of anything even remotely similar to this
>> kind of functionality/usage?  does this seem an
>> interesting/appropriate usage for the jabber substrate?  better forum
>> to discuss this sort of thing?  any and all comments are appreciated.
>> thanks!
>>
>> cheers,
>> nigel
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> jdev mailing list
>> jdev at jabber.org
>> http://mailman.jabber.org/listinfo/jdev
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> jdev mailing list
> jdev at jabber.org
> http://mailman.jabber.org/listinfo/jdev