672233 - Bootstrap profile information via webfinger

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Participation Infrastructure :: Phonebook, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Austin King [:ozten]]

It would be cool to pre-populate the profile information during sign-up.

We should use webfinger for discovery.


Example:
webfinger -> portable contacts #me -> First Name Last Name, etc. 

There are probably a couple of different profile data sources (hcard, etc) that we should try to fallback on.

Comment 1

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

We need a problem statement, context, benefits and requirements here before deciding on a solution. Taking...

Comment 2

[Tantek Çelik]

Once we have a "web address" (website/homepage) field on the sign-up form, we can do auto-discovery via hCard from there.

General problem statement: have to (re)enter lots of fields for yet another profile.
Possible solution: 
* add "Personal Web Address" (per bug 690357) to top of sign-up form
* when user enters their web address, go AJAX auto-discover/import their hCard and prepopulate the following fields: email, first/given name, last/family/surname, and photo.

Benefits:
This method is better than webfinger for a few reasons:
1. More pragamatic. There are far more personal web sites with hCard than email providers that support webfinger. Or did you expect everyone to use their gmail?
2. Simpler for members. The complexity of supporting webfinger on your domain (learn XML, XRDS, .well-known) is far greater than hCard (add a few HTML class names to existing content). See: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-authoring
3. Simpler to implement/consume. See: http://microformats.org/wiki/representative-hcard-parsing for simple copy/paste Javascript (for AJAXing) and PHP (for server-side retrieval).
4. More open web. The aforementioned complexity/difficulty of implementing webfinger on your own domain effectively means that typically only large companies will do it and/or get it working - this makes webfinger more of an oligarchic technology (biased in design towards small number of large companies with one or more dedicated XML/API programmers on staff). On the otherhand, hCard, due to its simplicity, is already quite well adopted across a long tail of personal / independent domains, demonstrating it's broader accessibility and thus more open-in-practice implementability.

Comment 3

[Dave Dash [:davedash, :dd] (assign all bugs to mbrandt)]

I'd find it more valuable to link to a facebook account, or something else that has all this data, and possibly use it to stay in sync.

Unless those things use hcard or webfinger.

Comment 4

[Tantek Çelik]

(In reply to Dave Dash [:davedash] from comment #3)
> I'd find it more valuable to link to a facebook account, or something else
> that has all this data, and possibly use it to stay in sync.
> 
> Unless those things use hcard or webfinger.

Facebook, Twitter, and numerous other "social networks" or other profiles have hCard: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcards - not to mention the long tail of indieweb / personal sites: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-examples-in-wild

The same cannot be said of webfinger.

Comment 5

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

Marking this as a P5 since it has minimal UX impacts compared with other UX work underway/proposed.

Comment 6

[Nikos Roussos [:comzeradd]]

Following program meeting this is currently out of scope.