It's something I proposed for IRC 3. Of course, IRC 3 never happened...
IRC has many of the same problems as DNS, because nicknames are global, have to be short (because people type them), and there are thousands of users.
One day I was using two servers, because the network was really splitty. I had two different nicknames, therefore. People on different sides of the split were sending messages to different metas, but both sets of messages were combined in my ircII window. It suddenly struck me that there was no reason I couldn't be having a conversation with multiple people and multiple channels at once, but with each of them knowing me by a different name. When I joined a channel, I could have a list of suggested nicknames. The users' client software would go down the list, and pick the first one that they didn't already know someone by. If that failed, some manipulation could be used to make one of the nicknames unique.
Underneath, there would need to be a GUID. Users would never see it, though. Their software would translate GUIDs to nicknames and back transparently. If I wanted to rename someone from "Sky" to "Deb", only I would ever see it. If that person logged in via a different ISP, they'd use the same GUID, and I'd see the same nickname. There could be thousands of Debs on the network, and it would only matter if two of them wandered into the same channel.
The only problem I couldn't solve was: what happens to human-to-human communication that relies on the specific value of the name? On IRC, puns and jokes about people's nicknames are very common. A user nicknamed burma started changing the nickname to unaburma when the big Unabomber manhunt was in progress. People make Sky-related jokes on her channel all the time. meta as my nickname isn't just an arbitrary string for convenience; it was carefully chosen.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2002-07-04 06:23 am (UTC)IRC has many of the same problems as DNS, because nicknames are global, have to be short (because people type them), and there are thousands of users.
One day I was using two servers, because the network was really splitty. I had two different nicknames, therefore. People on different sides of the split were sending messages to different metas, but both sets of messages were combined in my ircII window. It suddenly struck me that there was no reason I couldn't be having a conversation with multiple people and multiple channels at once, but with each of them knowing me by a different name. When I joined a channel, I could have a list of suggested nicknames. The users' client software would go down the list, and pick the first one that they didn't already know someone by. If that failed, some manipulation could be used to make one of the nicknames unique.
Underneath, there would need to be a GUID. Users would never see it, though. Their software would translate GUIDs to nicknames and back transparently. If I wanted to rename someone from "Sky" to "Deb", only I would ever see it. If that person logged in via a different ISP, they'd use the same GUID, and I'd see the same nickname. There could be thousands of Debs on the network, and it would only matter if two of them wandered into the same channel.
The only problem I couldn't solve was: what happens to human-to-human communication that relies on the specific value of the name? On IRC, puns and jokes about people's nicknames are very common. A user nicknamed burma started changing the nickname to unaburma when the big Unabomber manhunt was in progress. People make Sky-related jokes on her channel all the time. meta as my nickname isn't just an arbitrary string for convenience; it was carefully chosen.