Google Wants To Give You The Finger!

Google is pushing forward with an idea to give us the finger, but a finger known as a ‘New WebFinger’. What is it? Back in the early days of the web it  provided extensive information about the user of an email account. But the practice lost favor due to privacy considerations.

According to a recent article it further states that:

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.

So what do you think? Would you want to be a part of this open identification?

Comments welcome.

Source.