14 DAY TRIAL // Online identities are becoming an integral part of life; if someone wants to find out more about you it wouldn't take too long to find the information they want on the web. The problem isn't finding the info, it's the fact that it is scattered across dozens of online accounts from social networks to photo sharing and shopping sites. There are several initiatives to solve this but so far none have managed to get any real mainstream traction. So now Google is having a go at it by turning your Gmail address into your online ID using a technology called WebFinger.
“I've been talking about the importance of WebFinger to people here at Google and I've been hearing a unanimous "yes, of course, let's do it" from everybody,” Brad Fitpatrick, a Google software engineer, wrote. “In other words, 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.“
WebFinger is an extension of an ancient – by web standards – protocol used in the early days of the Internet to provide extensive information on the owners of email addresses. While it was convenient when the Internet was still very small, it soon lost popularity with security and privacy concerns. But now it may be making a comeback albeit in a Google flavor.
The idea of having a unified source of information and account credentials isn't exactly new – in fact, Fitpatrick also created one of the most viable alternatives, OpenID. The problem with OpenID is that, while it continues to get more and more sites on board with support, it's still a rather unwieldy system and hard to understand and start to use in any meaningful way by regular users. Facebook is also pushing hard with 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, the search giant 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, which, in a way, Facebook is already providing, by having additional information and meta data that social networking profiles don't have.