Your Google email address may become your online ID card
In what could either be viewed as a great thing or handing even more of your life over to Google, the Big G is working on a way to use your Gmail address as your online identity card.
A universal log-in for Web sites has long been a great idea, and while services such as OpenID exist, they can be a bit daunting to the novice user. More and more sites have been allowing you to use your Facebook, Google and Twitter accounts to identify yourself, but it still isn’t universal, and very little personal info follows along with those.
This is where WebFinger aims to come in.
Essentially a finger program is a way to attach information to some form of ID that will then allow you to be identified wherever you use it. Wikipedia explains the finger protocol as the following:
The Name/Finger protocol, written by David Zimmerman, is based on Request for comments document [RFC 742] (December 1977) as an interface to the name and finger programs that provide status reports on a particular computer system or a particular person at network sites. The finger program was written in 1971 by Les Earnest who created the program to solve the need of users who wanted information on other users of the network. Information on who is logged-in was useful to check the availability of a person to meet. This was probably the earliest form of Presence information technology that worked for remote users over a network.
Even though this idea has existed since 1977, it is now being talked about again as Google employee Brad Fitzpatrick announced on a Google Group yesterday that he had been given the green light to begin working on an implementation of it for Gmail accounts. There is no indication of how long development might take, but “soon” wouldn’t be the answer I would go with.
While this is a fascinating idea, and one that probably needs to happen, Google has already had many critics that say it controls too much of your online information. If we all begin to use Google WebFinger as essentially our driver’s license to the Web, expect those criticisms to become even louder.
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