Contact

From The Socknet

The contact function is used to discover information about the user and administrators of the Socknet provider. It is optional.

GET contact

->
{ administrators: [{ openid: "http://1337-geek.example.com" }],
  user: { openid: "http://user.com" }
}

More response fields may be added in the future.

All of the fields are optional.

The administrators field holds an array of objects containing the OpenID's of the users who control the system. There is currently no breakdown into "technical administrators", "business administrators", etc. But such a breakdown may be created in the future to mirror WHOIS.

The user field holds an object containing the OpenID of the user in control of this provider URL. The requestor should already know this OpenID under normal circumstances. However, the nature of OpenID makes this less assured.

Considerations

A user may have multiple, separate OpenID's and want to use the same Socknet provider to serve all of them and view their data in one place. If this is the case, a call to the contact function should return the correct OpenID in the user field based on the user that the requestor is associating with. This can be achieved by ensuring that there is a separate provider URL for each OpenID. For example:

• http://www.dave.com => http://provider.com/dave.com
• http://daves-business.com => http://provider.com/daves-business.com
• http://daves-wacky-hobby.com => http://provider.com/daves-wacky-hobby.com

These could all feed into the same system so that Dave can see all of the incoming messages, but they must act like separate accounts when interacting with the outside world.

In general, this is a level of complication that must be considered carefully before it is offered as a feature to users.