Tell HN: Introducing The Contact Protocol, what do you think?

contactprotocol.org

3 points·Rabidgremlin··2 comments

It's short and sweet, but I would have to ask if there really needs to be a protocol designed for this?

It doesn't help to solve the problem of deciding whether j. random http client should or should not get my contact information, and if so what level of contact they should get. If I meet someone on the subway, I may want to give them asynchronous access to my attention (email or twitter) but not synchronous (voice, txt, IM).

That would be an interesting problem that could only be solved by a protocol. What you have currently is a spec for a weekend project that would be the base for a reference implementation.

I was planning on adding a recommendations section that includs some suggestions on this. I was thinking that your contact url could carry this "authorization" information.

For example:

http://xyz.com/c/jack -> would return my most public data

http://xyz.com/c/jack/biz -> would return my business contact info

http://xyz.com/c/jack/cr56hj7 -> would return my most private contact data

In your example (perhaps):

http://xyz.com/c/olefoo/async and http://xyz.com/c/olefoo/sync

Or some such. It would be up to the Contact Server to provide this kind of contact "profile" functionality and you would decide who to give which URL to.

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