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Comment · 13 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
Akamai's State of the Internet report shows internet speeds worldwide: http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/

Average connection speed

* USA - 7,195 kbps * South Korea - 14,626 kbps * Japan - 10,513 kbps

Average peak connection speed

* USA - 29,626 kbps * South Korea - 48,750 kbps * Japan - 42,172 kbps

(I believe this is is per IP address and excludes Mobile traffic)

Comment · 14 years ago
Comment · 14 years ago
Comment · 14 years ago
That's in large part what WebFinger was created for, which I used as a model when developing this project: http://hueniverse.com/webfinger/

Gmail actually used to support it to a degree (it came along with Buzz) but in September I think they removed the host-meta file. WebFinger is still a big part of OStatus (which is what identi.ca is based on).

The main issue I have with WebFinger is that unless you have your own domain name, it's either tied to an e-mail service, or you get an identity that looks like an e-mail address but isn't. Gmail had it, then dropped it, and given Google+ I don't think they would have too much interest in bringing it back. OStatus acct: identifiers are a lot like e-mail addresses but I don't think they function as such.

Of course if you have your own domain you can make it so that isn't the case, but most people don't and if you try to create a free domain that makes it easy for people to do that sort of thing you basically end up with aka.nu anyway.

Comment · 14 years ago
Thank you for your comment.

First off I should note that an aka is an OpenID (see http://paul-odin-openid-test.blogspot.com/2012/12/hey.html) so all of the pros and cons of OpenID should in principle apply to akas. Akas just have a few constraints (a domain name served over HTTPS) and extras (the host-meta file metadata).

Here are a few circumstances where I think these additions could prove useful:

(1) Following akas. Given an OpenID like me.tinco.nl I don't think I can enter it into an app and keep track of what you're up to. The extra metadata allows an app to find your other profiles and subscribe to your activity. One of the features I was working on but didn't finish yet (there's some dormant code at https://my.aka.nu/hub) was to have the ability to subscribe to the host-meta file itself and automatically discover new additions and changes to your profile.

(2) Using your aka as a personal namespace. I'm hoping to add the ability to use create subdomains under your aka (for example a blog at blog.paul.aka.nu). Obviously you can do this already if you have your own domain name but it's generally viewed as an 'advanced' feature. Also there's no reason you can't use an aka as a domain for your email address. Incidentally this was the reason I originally bought aka.nu, as a demo domain for a simplified DNS administration tool I was working on.

(3) Authentication for non-browser apps. Let's say you've posted a photo somewhere and authorized access to me, paul.aka.nu. I could log in myself to wherever it's hosted using that as an OpenID, but what if I'm not using a browser to access it? My client can send you an assertion that it's accessing it under the authority of paul.aka.nu but you still need to go back to paul.aka.nu to verify it, which is where the extra metadata comes into play. (App.net has similar functionality: http://developers.app.net/docs/authentication/identity-deleg...)

Comment · 14 years ago
Comment · 14 years ago
Is there a list of Hypermedia-esque APIs in use today (apart from sitemap)? I can find lots of explanations of the concept but it's hard to find examples.

The closest I can think of is the way some APIs handle pagination (GitHub and Recurly for example) by using Link: rel=next/prev/start headers rather than through GET parameters, which in principle would allow a generic REST client to iterate through results on its own.

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