Josh Porter and Cori Schlegel on Federated Attention

Cori Schlegel (who provides technical support to AttentionTrust) commented on Josh Porter's post about social networks killing email, which sparked another post from Josh on A Messaging Proxy and Domain as Identity and some further discussion on federated identity, among other topics.

Cori's initial comment:

So, what we really need is a messaging proxy. I send an email to my daughter’s on-line identity, which forwards it in the form of a message to her (not-yet-existing) MySpace account. She replies, and my on-line identity forwards it to the IRC channel I’m in.

Combine context and presence with generic messaging. What a platform.

From Josh's post in response:

So yesterday we were talking about the problem that people in social networks have: when you’re active in social networks you are less active outside of them. You become immersed in them, so that when you’re in MySpace the people outside of MySpace get less of your Attention...

In the comments Cori Schlegel made the seemingly innocuous suggestion that we need a messaging proxy. Send a message to the proxy, and you get it on all of your devices or services that talk to your proxy.

This is a great idea! And the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that it is a perfect extension of an idea that I wrote about last year: domain as identity. (a post which, coincidentally enough, Cori commented on).

Here’s how it would work, as far as I understand it...

Instead of web sites having domain names, and those domains having mail accounts, people have domain names and one messaging account. My domain is Bokardo, and I have services at Bokardo.com that I control. Mail would be one of those services.

When mail is sent to mail.bokardo.com, it is forwarded to any devices or services I have added to my domain. So it acts as a proxy in this way...it serves as the place that all mail is sent to, and then I control where it goes after that...

Instead of having a separate messaging service for each context we’re in, we have a single messaging service provided by our own domain that routes messages for us. If we join a new social network, we still use our messaging proxy to relay the messages...

Attention-minded folks might see this idea as personal attention streams. Route messages through a single service, and you’ve got them all right there for picking. You’ve got a single address book comprised of everyone you’ve ever sent a message to, you know where you’ve spent your attention, and that could potentially be valuable information for oneself (and perhaps for others).

From Cori's follow-up in the comments:

I didn’t mean the comment all that innocuously, actually. Your post sparked something that seemed really important, and you’ve built that out to a solid ideological framework.

I like the idea a lot. A little of something for everyone. Federated identity, federated messaging, federated attention, federated presence. Some of the bits are already out there; SuprGlu has pieces of it, some people use GMail to cover other aspects. Placing it all under a domain and connecting it all together are the obvious missing pieces.

I'm still driving around the East Coast on vacation and at the moment am rushing to get out the door for the next leg of the trip, so I can't take the time to comment further here. But I think Josh and Cori have touched on some very significant topics, and I'm looking forward to thinking about them in greater depth.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data josh+porter cori+schlegel