Facebook steps into OpenID Foundation

Facebook has joined the board of the OpenID Foundation and will host an OpenID Design Summit later this month, according to a post on the social network's developer blog.

This is a bit of a surprise because Facebook has developed its own universal log-in standard, Facebook Connect, which theoretically competes with the nonprofit OpenID standard. It should be noted that Facebook has not yet announced any official plans to make the two compatible, and that just joining the board and hosting an event might not quell the criticism from open-source advocates who say Facebook is still too proprietary in its nature.

Engineer Luke Shepard will be Facebook's representative on the OpenID Foundation board, a corresponding post on the OpenID blog explained, adding that Shepard has been "a huge internal advocate for OpenID" at Facebook. The board also consists of members from Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal, VeriSign, and Yahoo as well as seven elected "community" members. Many of the corporate board members joined about a year ago; OpenID creator Brad Fitzpatrick is now employed by Google and has helped to build its OpenSocial developer platform standard.

"Given the popularity and positive user experience of Facebook Connect, we look forward to Facebook working within the community to improve OpenID's usability and reach," the post by David Recordon and Chris Messina read.

Facebook's blog post, written by engineering VP Mike Schroepfer, expressed similar goals. "It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web," Schroepfer wrote.

Facebook made a significant portion of its developer platform code open-source last summer.

[lordmorgul]

I think this is odd news and hard to figure out. They had the opportunity to allow facebook users to login with their own OpenID long ago and it would have taken a very small effort. They now have a NotOpenAtAll-ID of their very own, which is not OpenID or even similar in nature (it is a centralized online identification compared on the decentralized open id which is conceptually opposite). I really wonder where they are headed with this, but what I want from Facebook is to allow my already existing OpenID provider to be my access to Facebook. Until they do that, they are not going to please me, no matter what Facebook Connect morphs into.

[bkkissel]

For a look at what an integrated Facebook, MySpace, and OpenID login experience can be, check out https://www.mixx.com/login?return=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mixx.com%2F , http://uservoice.com/session/new , or http://www.kalydo.com/#openid

[WeCanDoBIZ]

This is odd news indeed, but welcome. Website owners everywhere have been wondering whether they should support OpenID from a third party provider, Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect and this move could provide some answers once we see where it's going.

I wonder if this move by Facebook was prompted in anyway by W3C agreeing to put together a Social Web Interoperability Incubator Group a few weeks back (http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/report#Next)?

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz