What is the ~/.gvfs file?

I recently made a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04 and I noticed an item .gvfs in my home folder.

It is very strange, since it is visible even though it has a leading .

What is even stranger is that I cannot determine the owner of the file:

drwxrwxr-x 2 martin martin 4096 juil. 6 17:48 .gstreamer-0.10
d????????? ? ? ? ? ? .gvfs
-rw-rw-r-- 1 martin martin 68 nov. 16 2013 .hgrc

EDIT:

I am sorry, I put my question too vaguely:

1. What is the purpose of this file/directory?
2. Why doesn't it contain any information in ls -la?
3. What does its presence and corruption tell about my system?
4. What should I do with it?
5. Why is it visible even with a preceding .?

EDIT2:

After reboot, the item disappeared.

2 Answers

It serves as mount point for GVFS-Fuse.

gvfs is a userspace virtual filesystem where mount runs as a separate processes which you talk to via dbus. It also contains a gio module that seamlessly adds gvfs support to all applications using the gio API. It also supports exposing the gvfs mounts to non-gio applications using fuse.^{Ubuntu Packages}

This is a FUSE mount point. By default, FUSE will prevent other users (even root) from accessing your FUSE mounts. I believe that this directory was mounted under a different user, or you are viewing the directory through a different user.

See this question for an explanation