I’ve just published webfinger-unofficial, a stand-in WebFinger server for major sites that don’t implement it themselves. It currently has implementations for Facebook and Twitter, deployed at these endpoints:
It’s just a little side project, and it’s not hugely useful on its own, but it is a step toward implementing OStatus bridge apps for more of the major social networking sites.
Feedback and pull requests are welcome!
2 Comments
Nice. I wonder if we should patch http://code.google.com/p/webfingerclient-dclinton/ to support alternate hosts for services that don’t support it natively…
I could go either way about the merits of this. On the one hand, their opting out of the ecosystem should in theory mean net less traffic over time (all other things being equal). On the other, having large identity providers from the outset helps bootstrap the number of identities and may incentivize more clients to participate.
Thoughts?
thanks! yeah, i haven’t fully nailed down the client side details. it does accept user identifiers with both domains, so if clients transform the user identifier, existing client libraries may work as is. yours does, for example:
http://webfingerclient-dclinton.appspot.com/lookup?identifier=snarfed_org@twitter-webfinger.appspot.com
however, the
host-metafiles have the official domain (e.g.twitter.com) in<hm:Host>, so if the client checks that against user identifiers, it may complain. that’s probably why the webfinger.org test client doesn’t work:http://webfinger.org/lookup/snarfed_org@twitter-webfinger.appspot.com
as to the merits, if it was a fair fight, and all of the sites were trying to build market share from the same clean slate, i’d agree. unfortunately, the audience is already pretty saturated with a short list of majors – fb, twitter, g+ – which don’t support the federated protocols, with minor exceptions like google’s webfinger.
also, third party hacks like this are way less useful than built in support, for both obvious reasons (user experience, features, compatibility) and less obvious ones (adoption, the ban hammer).
finally, full disclosure: my main motivation for hacks like these is selfish. i want to interact with my friends online, but i don’t want to have to use all of the different sites they use. this kind of thing will help me narrow down the clients i have to use. i care about the greater good too, and i’m ready to participate in the development communities, but it’s not always the single biggest thing driving me. :P