Re: [webfinger] Vision for Webfinger - what are we doing?

[Brad Fitzpatrick <[e-mail]>]

Encrypted email: the MUA can discovery the user's public key before
mailing, and encrypt it before it hits the first SMTP server.

Sending money with bitcoin: discovery the receipient's public wallet
address from their email address, or an endpoint to generate a wallet
address as a function of the sender.

etc

It makes email addresses readable for any use case, instead of just
SMTP-writable.



On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 8:21 PM, Eric Mill <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> I was at a hackathon <http://fedscoop.com/code-dc-calls-furloughed-feds/> today,
> and spent the day working on Webfinger libraries for Sinatra<https://github.com/konklone/sinatra-webfinger>and
> Jekyll <https://github.com/konklone/jekyll-webfinger>. It was really
> productive, but -- at the end of the day, a reporter was there asking
> everybody questions about their projects.
>
> When he asked what Webfinger was for, I realized that the original
> easy-to-communicate killer app for Webfinger, easing universal login
> through OpenID, was<http://productblogarchive.37signals.com/products/2011/01/well-be-retiring-our-support-of-openid-on-may-1.html>
> dead <https://www.myopenid.com/>. The only thing I could think to say was
> "Remember OpenID? Before it died? Well, this is a piece of the puzzle to
> putting something like that back together again."
>
> That didn't feel like a very impressive answer. So, now that OpenID is
> dead, what's the one line explanation for why Webfinger is important?
> What's the path forward to making Webfinger something people are
> incentivized to support?
>
> Should we be pushing really hard to resuscitate OpenID via OpenID Connect?
> Do we just need to wait for internal lobbying inside of
> Google/Microsoft/Twitter/etc to pay off in some announcement? I know
> Webfinger supports more than email lookup -- is there some particular
> killer app people were envisioning when they lobbied for that feature?
>
> I'm so happy there's finally an RFC, after so many years. I recognize how
> much work was put in to make that happen, and this shouldn't be taken as a
> criticism of anyone. I just want to know what others see for the future of
> Webfinger, and what I should do next.
>
> -- Eric
>
> --
> konklone.com | @konklone <https://twitter.com/konklone>
>
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