Webfinger

Webfinger is a really important and exciting new standard. I am pushing The Small Business Web (http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com) hard to wrap their heads around it. The vision is really powerful:

1. As users type in their email addresses, use AJAX to look for their webfinger profile. If they have one and it has an OpenID provider, replace the password / signup fields with a button to their specific OpenID provider. Goodbye OpenID NASCAR logo problem.

2. When the log in, you can discover other services they are using, such as their Portable Contacts provider, and in the future, Portable Time, Portable Expenses, etc. You will be able to automatically set up a customer with all their existing workflow and business data, and instantaneously get them up and running. Goodbye adoption curve problem.

it seems like there is a bit too much hinged off the email address and the domain that's on. In many cases this is controlled by an ISP or big company (gmail, hotmail etc). It seems like this is a barrier to getting the necessary infrastructure in place for steps 1, 2 & 3 to work correctly.

Perhaps there could also be some public ".well-known/finger" server that one could optionally register with if their email provider was slow moving?