webfinger - Project Hosting on Google Code
http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/

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Back in the day you could, given somebody's UNIX account (email address), type finger email@example.com and get some information about that person, whatever they wanted to share: perhaps their office location, phone number, URL, current activities, etc. The finger protocol, sadly, died. Fast-forward to Web 2.0. We're currently bickering about how we do interop between all these social web services, and even how we represent a person's identity. The two main identity identifier camps are email addresses and URLs.

Google Code Project Page for "WebFinger" protocol

We're bringing back the finger protocol, but using HTTP this time.

from here, it should be downhill to world-wide, usable identity

WebFinger is about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach public metadata to them