[Developers] GUIDs considered harmful

[Kurt Bollacker]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 05:31:44PM +0200, Will Moffat wrote:
> Dear Metaweb developers,
> 
> I wrote a bookmarklet for injecting Freebase content into other websites.
> You can see its output on this Gaia-Online forum:
> http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31225865

Cool!
 
> Unfortunately the links back to Freebase.com topics are broken. Gaia
> uses a redirect script that barfs on both '#' and the escaped form
> '%23'

I've verified with my "personal Gaia-Online tech support person" that
gaia does strip these purposefully for security reasons.  He believes
that myspace, facebook, and most other popular social net sites
operate similarly.
 
> Could Freebase.com provide another entry point? Something like
> freebase.com/view/8411f1
> would be so much better than
> freebase.com/view/?id=%239202a8c04000641f80000000008411f1
> 
> Of course, this would be less of an issue if we had human-readable
> IDs. Is this happening sometime soon? All the GUID stuff makes me feel
> like I'm editing a Windows Registry . Takes the fun out of Freebasing

For many topics, these already exist, but one cannot count on them
existing. e.g.

http://www.freebase.com/view/topic/en/star_trek

Unfortunately, "Friday's Child" is not one the topics with a human
readable ID.

> ;-)
> 
> regards,
> --Will
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