The Salmon Protocol: Introducing the Salmon Project

A few days ago, at the Real Time Web Summit, we had a session about Salmon, a protocol for re-aggregated distributed conversations around web content.  I was hoping for some feedback and to generate some interest, and I was overwhelmed by the positive reactions, especially after Louis Gray's post "Proposed Salmon Protocol aims to unify Conversations on the Web". Adina Levin's "Salmon - Re-assembling distributed conversations" is a good, insightful review as well. There's clearly a great deal of interest in this, and so I've gone ahead and expanded Salmon's home at salmon-protocol.org with an open source project, salmon-protocol.googlecode.com, and a mailing list, groups.google.com/group/salmon-protocol.

The project is a home for all types of open source code related to Salmon, but particularly reference implementations and validators.  At the moment, it contains the Python/Google AppEngine source code for the demo at salmon-playground.appspot.com. I also intend to host the actual spec text there for the moment, along with the reference implementation code, and develop both in parallel based on discussions on the mailing list.  The list is for discussions about the Salmon Protocol and its implementations.

This is also a call to action.  If you are interested in helping to define this new protocol, or work on a reference implementation or validator, please join the mailing list and introduce yourself.

Use your email address as an OpenID

We're not quite there yet, but soon you'll be able to use any reasonable user identifier as an OpenID.  Most importantly, email addresses.  Dirk just wrote a great blog post explaining "Email Addresses as OpenIDs" which goes into the nitty gritty.  Basically, this all just needs a finalized XRD spec to rely on, and adoption of same (and ability to use acct: URIs) in the next rev of the OpenID specification.  The upcoming IIW will be an great opportunity to make some progress on these.