
Google Points At WebFinger. Your Gmail Address Could Soon Be Your ID. - peter123
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/14/google-points-at-webfinger-your-gmail-address-could-soon-be-your-id/
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chrischen
Could potentially make OpenID useful. But I think there's more potential to
using a unified ID across the web than just sharing metadata. For example
interaction between two services to which you have authenticated.

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AndrewDucker
Well, that's OAuth - which allows you to tell each service that the other can
use it.

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AndrewDucker
That's great idea - I've seen Brad talk about this kind of thing back when he
was heavily involved in LJ - and I think it has a lot of potential for
bridging the gap between email addresses and URLs, thus meaning that anyone at
all can cope with OpenID and the like.

And by making it extensible (I love the idea of the "well-known" folder on the
protocol page) it can be used for a whole host of future uses. Very nicely
done.

EDIT: <http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/wiki/WebFingerProtocol> is the
protocol page.

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ams6110
Didn't Microsoft already try basically this, and fail spectacularly, with
Passport?

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anshul
No. Passport was not federated, open or free in any meaningful sense.

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mattlanger
I'm guessing Facebook ain't exactly thrilled by this news.

