Then we have compressed and uncompressed firstbits.
Not sure if serious. firstbits is a mapping to an address, whether it comes from a compressed key or not. My 12345 happens to be an uncompressed one—another address that starts with 12345 and comes from a compressed key will have different firstbits due to the need to disambiguate the prefix, not because of the underlying key.
As long as all programs recognize both compressed and uncompressed adresses, it's all good.
If, for some reason, a firstbits service only looks through the compressed or uncompressed adresses, or converts all of them to compressed or uncompressed adresses, people are mapping different adresses to the same firstbits.
This probably won't happen.
But then, I tried to import a compressed adress in Armory, didn't work. So I converted it to uncompressed, Armory importet that. But didn't show the balance after rescanning the blockchain..
I now expect unexpected behavior at every corner. Importing/exporting between clients? Blockexplorer? Firstbits? Try to explain that sht to a non-techie..
Ente