Yesterday, the IETF published the WebFinger protocol specification as RFC 7033. What WebFinger does is allow one to discover information about a URI, such an "acct" (account) URI. An "acct" URI is one that looks like an email address and is intended to identify a person's account at some service. Users do not usually perform WebFinger queries directly. Rather, they are issued by software applications that are looking for particular pieces of information. For example, a bitcoin wallet application might issue a query to retrieve a bitcoin address for given an email-style address like
paulej@packetizer.com.
I wrote a blog post about this that contains more information:
http://www.packetizer.com/people/paulej/blog/53This is a capability that the Bitcoin community has been discussing for several years. Now that the spec is complete, it's probably time to start formally discussing how WebFinger might be used with Bitcoin. The blog post shows three possible ways it might be used (static address retrieval, payments API, and dynamic address retrieval).
Cheers!
Paul
