I feel there is a lot of noise around IDs as URIs yet I've seen nobody (I may not have looked deep enought) talk about their main benefit as I perceive it, which is putting resources into the perspective of a global namespace. Thus allowing a service to reference resources provided by another service. This to me, looks like a practical revolution. We may at last have our contacts served by one entity, our statuses by another, our shared files by still another, and yet all of them could be handled as one distributed API.
The code glueing the whole to produce, say, a distributed facebook-like app, would still have to know the specifics of each provider (before standards emerge), but it would effectively break the isolation and allow us to composite services much more easily.
Well, you're on HN: everyone wants to control everything. Startups don't 'win' by playing nicely with each other, they drive their competitors out of business.
