Back in the day you could, given somebody’s 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 identifer camps are email addresses and URLs.

In another year, we’ll all be back to using this forgotten standard.

VAX and gopher next up for resurrection?