Re: [mmox] The Story So Far...

Hurliman, John schrieb:
> The proposal for a virtual world identity service that I've been typing away at uses OpenID, OpenID Attribute Exchange, and OpenID Token Exchange to define a base set of interfaces and attributes for virtual world identity. In my opinion, there's a balancing act between asserting that virtual worlds add nothing new to the equation and nothing needs to be developed, and asserting that virtual worlds are an entirely new problem and throwing away the last decade or more of work.

Sounds cool, looking forward to it.

As for the balancing act: Of course there is a lot new which virtual 
worlds bring but there is also a lot in common with social networks, 
such as identity, profiles, groups, IM, assets.
What's new is of course the actual 3D part of it. But you might see this 
"just" as an additional service to offer. Of course it's a rather big 
service and it might need additional ties into esp. the asset realm.

And on the web as on VWs people are thinking hard about how to enable 
identities across networks so my hope is that both solutions are 
somewhat compatible :-)  (as said, the keywords there are OpenID, OAuth 
and OpenSocial. Microformats are also used but of course those are 
eventually a bit out of scope for VW based systems which might not 
necessarily have web pages attached).

But in general I think it would be cool if I could login to some virtual 
world with my Yahoo OpenID and use my MySpace profile information plus 
find contacts from e.g. MySpace as well. This actually is not really far 
off as Yahoo supports OpenID and MySpace supports OAuth and OpenSocial. 
So some parts are already in place.

-- Christian

PS: When I say OpenSocial I mean the REST API which allows you to 
read/write profile information, contacts etc. Not the gadget stuff. The 
only problem with it might be that the profile schema has not all the 
fields needed for virtual worlds, like location has a completely 
different semantic here. But such things can be fixed I guess.

> 
> John
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Christian Scholz [mailto:cs@comlounge.net]
>> Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 4:25 PM
>> To: Hurliman, John
>> Cc: mmox@ietf.org
>> Subject: Re: [mmox] The Story So Far...
>>
>> Hi!
>>
>> Hurliman, John schrieb:
>>
>>> The agent domain concept takes several independent services (identity,
>> presence, inventory) and lumps them together into a single trust domain.
>> This inhibits the development of a widely distributed ecosystem like we
>> find on the web today, and is really only convenient for large virtual
>> world service providers that already have a vertical stack of services.
>> It also drags in the assumption that there must be a backend
>> communication layer between services such as inventory and simulation
>> regions.
>>
>> Speaking of the web: There are already a lot of social networks out
>> there which are right now going to work on interoperability regarding
>> profile data, activity streams, authentication and general authorization
>> (based on efforts like OAuth (now also here at IETF), OpenID,
>> OpenSocial, PortableContacts, XRDS-Simple etc.).
>>
>> It would be great if these efforts can be integrated so that we don't
>> have the problem in the end to bring web and virtual world together
>> although both have basically the same idea of distributed services (and
>> even partly the same services).
>>
>> So let me ask in the question: Is this of general interest for this
>> group to try to bridge that web/VW gap as well?
>>
>> I think it would be of value because many of the protocols are already
>> in use and thus are understood, have library support and so on.
>>
>> That being said IMHO the Agent Domain really could be far more separated
>> into separate services. All you maybe need is one starting point for
>> your identity and some service catalogue which lists where all the other
>> services are, either your individual ones (where is my profile, where
>> are my group memberships) or service level ones (where is the region
>> info, which login methods do you support).
>>
>> -- Christian
>>
>>
>> --
>> Christian Scholz
>> Blog: http://mrtopf.de/blog
>> Company: http://comlounge.net
>> Podcasts: http://datawithoutborders.net, http://openweb-podcast.de
>>
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-- 
Christian Scholz
Blog: http://mrtopf.de/blog
Company: http://comlounge.net
Podcasts: http://datawithoutborders.net, http://openweb-podcast.de