The Great Symbol Swap

In an XDI-related marketing meeting last Tuesday, the marketers in attendance came up with a dramatic new idea: changing the XDI context symbol for organizational/legal identifiers from @ to +.

The reason is simply that Twitter has created a defacto usage of @identifiers. By switching from @ to +:

Any perceptual or branding conflict with @identifiers would be eliminated.

We keep the personal and organizational/legal namespaces completely separated (as has always been our intention).

The + symbol has a nice symbiosis with = (both are mathematical symbols).

+ has the connotation of "partnership".

If other XDI TC members agree about this, it leaves the question of what should become the context symbol for the dictionary space. There are 4 basic options:

Use the @ symbol, e.g., =drummond@home, =drummond@home<@email>

Use the * symbol, e.g., =drummond*home, =drummond*home<*email>

Use the # symbol, e.g., =drummond#home, =drummond#home<#email>

Use the $ symbol, e.g., =drummond$home, =drummond$home<$email>

In the first case, it would be a direct swap of + and @. This would have the minimum impact on existing code bases.

In the other three cases, we'd have a three way symbol swap.

This is obviously an important change, so I'm going to put in on the agenda for tomorrow's  XDI TC call.

=Drummond