YooMoot - I like this startup

YooMoot

Read about this startup yesterday and it looks interesting. Sometime when reading a blog, you feel like leaving a comment and then you either need to sign up on the site or do it anonymously. Once this is done it is hard to know if someone commented on your comment or asked for more information. The only way to do it is to keep visiting the site often.

I think the best way to solve this problem is to come up with an API.

• create topic (url of blog post)
• post comment (url of blog post, optional inReplyTo)
• get comments (url of blog post) - returns tree of comments

So as a user, all I do is register with a siteX which manages all my comments.
As a blog owner, I use the API of the site to authenticate users and storage API for storing and retrieving comments. Bundle in some default java script to show the functionality on a page.

Now it is fairly straight forward for siteX to show me all the comments I have written and all the replies I have got.  Given the open API, someone might as well write iphone/andriod app to do it all from the phone. Similarly when I go to siteY where I commented, I still see all my comments and replies.

I guess where I am comming from is Internet as file system, one account, user owns what he writes, irrespective of where it shows up. He can change/delete it any time. It is fairly easy to extend the concept to "virtual files" like my photographs, or presence information or location etc which may or maynot be stored with siteX, but siteX plays to role of a gatekeeper to my personal information and any other siteY that wants to use it, has to go through siteX to access it.

In short siteX is my home directory. I am not sure how far YooMoot will take this concept, but looks powerful, if they can solve the chicken and egg problem.