Fingerhook – A Webfinger Experiment
Recently, I was reading up on Webfinger again. It had been a while. In fact, all the topics I was studying in the summer of 2009 died down and this summer I have tried to refresh and stay updated on all the Federated ID and Social Networking Movement. In the past year, their has been a lot of effort and commitment by many talented people from start-ups and behemoths and people in between.
I don’t want to speculate in this post where everything might be heading or delve into all the intricacies of “Open” and Federated Networking. This post is just to reference a quick experiment that I whipped up over the course of a few nights to express an idea that uses Webfinger, a Personal Web Discovery protocol that leverages IDs that are email addresses or at least look like email addresses (e.g. XMPP JID). Webfinger latches on to the belief that the email address resonates with people as their IDs more than URLs do. This is an interesting debate. I believe this is true but I also find it hard to believe that people can not eventually think of a domain/url, which typically would be their profile page of choice, as being their “ID”. A profile page should be synonymous with ID. And often is usable as an OpenID even if the user has no idea about what that means. So the problem is the state of Public Profiles and Federated IDs on the Interwebs. And Lock-in. Today, half a billion people have Facebook accounts. In 3 years, maybe that number will have dropped 30% or rather, maybe people who use Facebook do not use it as their trusted ID and instead depend on Google or some other service such as their own web host or domain registrar that has the capabilities built-in. So the URL as ID today is too unstable. And by this I mean the ID that people actually identify with being their ID. Now that was a weird sentence to write 
So today, a group of people have been driving the idea of Webfinger, based loosely on the original Finger protocol, to be the common technology today for Federated IDs and User Discovery. It is making email addresses “readable” by attaching public metadata to them using agreed upon standards (still being modified). The result is the ability to lookup email addresses to find out more about the person or company behind it.
Ok, Back to my experiment. It is called Fingerhook. Or at least it is the first project/feature of Fingerhook. That depends on whether or not I continue to tinker in this area. I might want to host a Webfinger Profile/Cloud server and Fingerhook could be used for these other services. But for now, I will refer to Fingerhook as this experiment that i’m about to point to.
Briefly, Fingerhook is a Webfinger Lookup Service that accepts requests via Email (SMTP) and auto-responds with results containing any discovered public metadata about the email address. In order to make this work, I experimented with what is called Subaddressing which is simply adding tags to an email address as a way to filter and organize messages. So, a subaddress is an extension of the primary address and you can have anbd use unlimited subaddresses as long as your service provider supports it. Typically a Subaddress uses the plus character (+) to segment/divide the local part of the address. Here is an example:
The “+info” is added on to my actual email address (sulleleven@gmail.com).
If you were to email this address, you should get an auto-response with my info form my Google public profile page. Feel free to try it.
The way Fingerhook works is quite simple actually. This is not so much about the tech as it is about the idea that I wanted to express. And I felt that showing in addition to telling was appropriate so dedicated some spare time to setup this project and possibly further discuss with those interested in Webfinger.
Over on Fingerhook.org, their is a blog with some screencasts published that demonstrate the experiment. So i’ll let that info on that site fill in the blanks and leave it at that. Feel free to comment here or over there or on the Webfinger mailing list – http://groups.google.com/group/webfinger.
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