I love the Internet Identity Workshop! it is where innovative ideas are hatched, answers to hard problems are vetted and standards consensus emerges. This is just the latest in amazing collaborations that have emerged.

Web Finger was covered on Tech Crunch today with this headline - Google Points At WebFinger. Your Gmail Address Could Soon Be Your ID.

At IIW in May they had a session lead by John Panzer. The notes were not filled out that much but (All the Notes from IIW)   

but there is a white board of their conversation and a link to what google had up.

Chris Messina spliced it together

XRD the discovery protocol is part of how Web Finger works. This spun out of XRI.

Techcrunch didn't explicitly pick up on the fact that Eran Hammer-Lahev has been a key collaborator and is at Yahoo! (they did link to the mailing list where he is posting). He has been really driving XRD forward lately.

All exciting stuff.