I'm really against the proliferation of face databases because it just
doesn't scale. In my opinion we should be promoting X-Face: header
lines. I don't want to have the face of everyone in the known universe
stored at my site, and I'm at a big site, we don't really care about
disk, what about the poor sucker who has a handful of locally
administered machines who doesn't want to devote
(100000 usenet users * 1 Kbyte) = 100 Meg
to a face database.
Eons ago I had an /etc/hosts file, it grew and grew, it became
unworkable so now I have nameservers. Every so often I have difficult
connecting from machine A in France to machine B in Australia because
machine C in Palo Alto is down, but basically it works. A lot of work
went into the nameserver protocol, we could conceivably embark on a
similar path with faces--I see hints of it in these faceserver
suggestions. But why bother? X-Face: is an elegant solution.
Stop the rot, include an X-Face: today!
Mark Shand