On Sunday, I gave a 5-minute Ignite talk on Webfinger at Ignite RailsConf in Baltimore. Ignite talks are highly structured things, where you prepare 20 slides, submit them well in advance, and that auto-advance every 15 seconds during the talk. It forces the presenter to do a polished job, where you can't wing it or whip things up at the last minute. I put 7 hours into the slides, rehearsed the talk 4 times before giving it, and I think that's about right.

I submitted the talk proposal on Webfinger back in March, while I was still jazzed about all those fancy new APIs that Buzz introduced me to, but without any actual knowledge or authority. When my talk was accepted, I suddenly had to know it well enough to explain it to people, and managed to cobble together a reasonable introduction to Webfinger - what it is, why it's awesome, how to use it, and a glimpse of what I hope to be the future.

The slides are embedded below, and you can download a PDF of the whole thing. This is an Ignite talk, so the slides are very simple and visual, and missing some information - the spoken component is really important. Video of the talk hasn't been posted yet, I'll post it up here when it is. The audience reacted very positively to it, and I fielded a bunch of questions afterwards, so I think it went pretty well!

Also, if you find Webfinger interesting, you should join the discussion on the mailing list The stuff in the latter part of my talk is all still very much in debate, so if you have feelings and opinions, now's a good time to contribute them.

Update: Video of my talk has been posted on YouTube.