Discovery by Email, Domain, or entityID

[Nate Klingenstein]

> To be fair though noone ever (AFAIR, but you've been at this longer
> than I have) suggested that discovery be done by having subjects enter
> URLs (I'm guessing you mean entityIDs, from the email's subject).

Presumably, but I don't think they'd have to be if redirects were in place.

A similar protocol did actually try having users identify themselves by URL: OpenID.  One could make a very plausible argument that Facebook Connect would not exist or have taken over had Google, Yahoo, Myspace, and others been focused on OpenID and users' identities being URL's.  They eventually tried to solve it with something called XAuth by a company called Meebo that was essentially one giant centralized discovery service.  You haven't heard of it lately for reasons.

> And our discovery services could easily be taught to work from an
> email address just as well (by looking for matches in the RHS/domain
> portion of the email address) for those already shaped by
> commsumer-space experiences.

Absolutely.  It's just not there yet, and there is no real field in metadata for "domain".  The closest thing we have is shibmd:Scope and guesses based on endpoints or entityID's(urn:federation:MicrosoftOnline, I'm looking at you).

I'd also be curious to hear others weigh in.