Instead of PKI

[ciphergoth]

Remember I said that PKI deserves to die?

This Clay Shirky essay states the problem with names in a really nice way (it's an independent reinvention of the ideas in this one but in clearer language)

Mark S Miller has taken the shape of the problem and shown that it's the shape of the solution! Here's how names should really be handled.

At first I thought "who would go to the effort of writing <pn>Alison</pn> all the time?" But the answer is, of course "anyone who can be bothered to write <lj user="purplerabbits">" - ie, it seems, nearly everyone who uses LJ.

This is really neat. And it's just become an essential part of my ideas on how LJ can become decentralised.

I can imagine the user interface already. You see a story that says

went to the cinema with ?Connor, who insisted we watch Spiderman.

Click on the "?Connor" and you get a little interface that tells you about the name in terms of names you already know.

* This user prefers the name Connor, but you already have a user of that name in the database (edit)
* Grant knows ?Connor as Daniel (accept)
* David knows ?Connor as Gingernuts Johnson (accept)
* Enter your own choice here _______ (accept)

[ ] Publish choice

Click on the appropriate "accept", and that name will be subsituted in that and all future appearances:

went to the cinema with Gingernuts Johnson, who insisted we watch Spiderman.

(U: replaced "?Ciaran" with "?Connor")

Update: A burst of nostalgia for the day we lost our naming innocence, just over eight years ago (and prescient words a few months earlier)

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

* This user prefers the name Ciaran, but you already have a user of that name in the database (edit)
* Grant knows ?Ciaran as Daniel (accept)
* David knows ?Ciaran as Gingernuts Johnson (accept)
* Enter your own choice here _______ (accept)

Could get horribly recursive if, say, Grant or David had other names too.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The assumption is that you already have those names in your database; in other words you've already decided to know those people by those names. People you don't know might also have names for that individual, but they wouldn't show up on your menu.

If the UI can't find anyone you've named who's named them, it might resort to looking more than one hop away for a match:

* Tom's Brian knows ?Ciaran as Malcolm (accept)