WebFinger is about making email addresses more valuable
By at August 17, 2009 | 12:49 am | Print
What Company Is Offering:
WebFinger is about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach public metadata to them.
How It Works:
That metadata might include: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.
WebFinger is about making that file discoverable at all. The community can explore and innovate within that discovery file later.
More at:http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/