On grappling with meta-information in the internet

The Internet has changed dramatically in recent years. In particular, the fundamental change has occurred in terms of who generates most of the content, the variety of applications used and the diverse ways normal users connect to the Internet. These factors have led to an explosion of the amount of user-specific meta-information that is required to access Internet content (e.g., email addresses, URLs, social graphs). In this paper we describe a foundational service for storing and sharing user-specific meta-information and describe how this new abstraction could be utilized in current and future applications.