YADIS in one sentence

[Michael Graves]

David Recordon <david <at> sixapart.com> writes:

> 
> It isn't just identity though.  Really it is just service discovery,
> whether that be for identity as we talk about it today, identity as in
> FOAF, or any other resource a web site might provide such as RSS feeds.
> 
> --David

Or SIP services. Or VoIP routing. Or presence monitoring. Or...

Identity is hopefully the first "Killer App" for YADIS, but YADIS really has 
nothing in it that is inherently ID-centric. (Other than the fact that *any* 
metadata about URL is in the general sense contributing to the "identity").

Blogs were the "Killer App" that really established RSS, but RSS is and will be 
used much more broadly than just for blog posts. Same thing with YADIS. If it 
gets any traction at all with the focus on enabling interop for ID systems, it 
will quickly go supernova into a whole bunch of other application areas.

What I tell people right now, internally and externally, that YADIS is:

"The service discovery layer for Web2.0."

For me, that's a good jumping off point. I can equivocate about the 
appropriateness/currency of the term "Web2.0" if needed. I immediately follow 
up with identity system interop as an example of why it's important and needed 
right now. I can stress the elegance of URLs-as-discovery-nodes if the context 
is a technical one. And it manages to get the basic idea across to non-
technical types in just a handful of words.

-Mike