Google Plans to work on WebFinger-Your Virtual ID

August 15, 2009 - 6:52 am | 4 views

Technology.am (Aug. 15, 2009) — If someone wants to know about you it wouldn’t take too long to find the information on the web. But the information is scattered across dozens of online accounts from social networks to photo sharing and shopping sites. Several initiatives have come and gone.

fingerpointing Now Google is serious about it by turning your Gmail address into your online ID using a technology called WebFinger, which is an extension of something called the finger protocol that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses.

Brad Fitpatrick, a Google software engineer said, “we’ve eliminated both technical & political hurdles. We can now work on this spec, implement, push, try, rinse, repeat…. until we’re all reasonably happy.”

The idea of having a unified source of information and account credentials isn’t exactly new. Fitpatrick had created OpenID.

Facebook has also created something similar, Facebook Connect, which allows users to login on a growing number of sites using their Facebook account.

Google’s implementation isn’t an exact replacement for OpenID and could even use the login protocol to provide the credentials.In fact, Google supports OpenID for all of its products, as does Facebook.

But the WebFinger protocol could be used on a lot more than just credentials and even more than just a public profile, by having additional information and meta data that social networking profiles don’t have.

Here are some of the ideas from the WebFinger Google Code page:

* public profile data

* pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)

* a public key

* other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)

* a URL to an avatar

* profile data (nickname, full name, etc)

* whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it’s NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com

* or even a public declaration that the email address doesn’t have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.

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