[Freebase-discuss] the future of freebase user ids

[Kirrily Robert]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Thad Guidry <thadguidry at gmail.com> wrote:
> For me, since Freebase is a community, (one of which I contribute to),
> I typically involve myself within that community such as email, tasks,
> etc.  Just my involvement, I know, will typically divulge my email
> address, and I want them to, so that others can contact me, otherwise
> its pointless.  What I type into Google Buzz is public, and I know
> that, and so am not worried that soon, Freebase users can tell /user
> thadguidry is in fact the same as thadguidry at gmail.com who posts an
> occasional Google Buzz about "semantic databases".

Michael may correct me on this, but my understanding is that your
Freebase user account (/user/thadguidry) won't be trivially linkable
to your email address.  People on Freebase will still see you as
/user/thadguidry, and only Freebase itself (well, MetaGoogle) will
have the connection between that and your Google login account (and
hence gmail address etc.)  It would be kind of like a Youtube account
that way -- in fact I think Youtube is not a bad way to think about
it, if you've been through that process of hooking your YT account up
to your google login.

Basically, I'm thinking of this as Freebase outsourcing its user
management to Google, who have much better systems in place for that
sort of thing than we do. That way, we'll have more time to work on
actual data-related things rather than user admin etc.

K.

-- 
Kirrily Robert
skud at google.com
http://freebase.com/