You say that XRI and XDI were invented "out of the ether". While it's true that the former represents a new identifier format and the later a new structured data sharing protocol, both are based on existing Web techhologies (URIs, HTTP, XML, RDF) just like almost any other approach to a Social Web of which I am aware.

And as I think you know, XRI and XDI have been slowly growing "towards the mainstream" as interest in a distributed social web continues to grow, and as the need for mechanisms that will let users control the flow and sharing of their own personal data continue to mount up.

So I'm a big supporter of anything that gets us to a true distributed social web, but please don't discount XRI and XDI because they are trying, as open standards, to help solve the problem. There was a time when HTML, HTTP, and URIs were all new open standards too.

Best,

=Drummond
http://xri.net/=drummond

The number of people/companies interested in these ideas at the time was very small. The notion of open standards needed to support a whole soon to happen ecology of social networks was ahead of its time. My hope is that the thinking of those involved in these early days can be tapped by newer emerging communities working on the same kinds of ideas.

A key element that XRI has that will be super useful to the emerging social web and distributing it is abstraction - I wrote about it in this post - mid way down.

Identity Commons 1 is quite different then the IC community now - the current model is about linking existing efforts together like OpenID, InfoCards, OSIS, and could also include projects like OAuth, DiSo, Microformats that are related but different - a linking brand for these efforts that all share a vision of user-control and open standards. We don't know the "answer" for the challenge of successfully representing people online and the complexities of their social network - we do know that working together and out of these kinds of efforts innovation and solutions will emerge.

I too look forward to finding the Delta between the big vision presented in the two papers I linked to and the current market place.

I agree with you that the Diso concept is not wholly original — and indeed, I was influenced by Identity Commons in some of my thinking on the subject. I think two of the main differences that set apart the Diso Project from Identity Commons is heritage and approach.

I started the Diso Project because I was frustrated with the failure of the microformats initiative to show any real end-user benefit. After promoting microformats for two years, the kind of distributed social web that I wanted just wasn't materializing, even though I felt like we had the basic building blocks ready to go. The Diso Project was intended to galvanize the community to apply microformats and similar technologies to the problem of distributing the social web.

As for the approach — where XDI and XRI were invented out of the ether (to the best of my knowledge) — the Diso Project has tried to invent as little as possible and to reuse wherever feasible. It may mean that we don't arrive at clean APIs like the ones found in the Facebook platform, but at least adoption can be achieved incrementally, because the implementation cost is so much lower.

While I think that a lot of the ideas that you presented in 2004 continue to be just beyond our reach, we are making progress — though largely by being conservative with the technologies that we build and their initial capabilities (OpenID being a great example of that kind of design). I am interested to see the delta between what's emerging from the marketplace and the ideas that were presented in your whitepaper.