For the past few years, Facebook has been flirting with the possibility of supporting the OpenID log-in standard, which calls itself "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity" without actually building support for it.
Now, the massive social network--once famous for its ultra-walled-garden approach to data and user experience--announced Monday that it has become an OpenID "relying party," which basically means that it's started, at last, to deploy support for the standard. Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation in February, even though many considered its Facebook Connect log-in standard to be a proprietary competitor.
But, Monday's announcement indicated, Facebook believes the two can work in tandem.
"We've always let our users express their real world connections," a post on the Facebook blog read. "From the beginning, Facebook users could use their college and workplace identities to establish real world networks. Now, they can use open standards to establish their identities on Facebook."
Most notably, you can now register for a Facebook account with your Gmail account, or can link an existing Facebook account with Gmail or other OpenID-participating services if they support automatic log-in.
"We've always believed that making the user experience as secure, lightweight, and intuitive as possible, which 200 million people can comfortably enjoy and understand, is one of our top priorities," the blog post read. That could be a subtle nod to the fact that OpenID, founded in 2005, has historically been a bit difficult for the non-tech-savvy to comprehend.
Facebook's blog post also said that security concerns have been an issue. In working with the OpenID community, "we shared our experience developing Facebook Connect, where we eventually came up with a design that ensures that users would know that they were providing their login credentials to Facebook, and not some unscrupulous site."
The plus side? Facebook's tests have indicated that if new users can register with an existing Web service account, like Gmail, that they are more likely to stick around.
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.
Now, this is kind of neat: Facebook Connect, the sprawling social network's universal-login project, has started to come to desktop software. Namely, it's been hooked up to the Apple photo-management software iPhoto, per a post on the company developer blog.
"We are excited that sharing your photos with the people you care about has become even easier with iLife '09, Apple's new suite of applications that includes iPhoto '09," the post by Facebook platform manager Dave Morin said. "Users of iPhoto '09 can easily share and tag photos from iPhoto directly to Facebook. With help from Facebook Connect, photo tags from iPhoto '09 can be added to Facebook and generate Facebook notifications. Additionally, Mac users can update Facebook News Feed and alert friends anytime they update their websites using Apple's iWeb '09 application."
Basically, this means that if you're a Mac user running the latest edition of its iLife package, which started shipping earlier this week, you can hook up your Facebook account for easy uploading right from iPhoto. If you use the iWeb site creation tool, you can set it up to post a message to your Facebook profile (and your friends' news feeds) if you make some kind of edit. That's pretty similar to what a number of Web-based blogging services have already set up using Facebook's platform.
I haven't actually checked it out yet, so I can't provide a thumbs up or down, but the concept itself is pretty cool. Facebook rolled out its Facebook Connect product, which lets third-party sites (and now desktop apps, apparently) use Facebook usernames and passwords for user accounts, over the second half of last year. The reception, so far, has been generally positive.
What'll be really interesting is to see the further implications of Web-based login standards like Facebook Connect as they're synced up to more desktop applications. Not that you'd really want to share all your Microsoft Word edits in your news feed or anything.
These data portability announcements keep rolling on: On Monday, Google announced that its Google Friend Connect product, which plugs social-networking features into participating sites, is now compatible with Twitter.
So what does this mean? Well, if you go to a site that uses Google Friend Connect, you can opt to use your Twitter credentials to log in to it. Then, as the official Google blog explained, you can then find which of your other Twitter friends are using the same site. Also, you can send out a "tweet" announcing that you've joined up.
Twitter was one of the launch partners for the MySpace Data Availability service, now known as MySpaceID. That has yet to launch, but MySpace has used Google Friend Connect to power the standard, so this could be a sign that it's still on the way.
What's not on Twitter yet? Facebook Connect, the rival log-in product developed by the social network, which rolled out to a full launch on the same day as Google Friend Connect. Rumor has it that Facebook tried to buy Twitter in a failed $500 million deal. There's still no reason to assume Twitter won't integrate Facebook Connect, but for now, it's just Google's alternative.
The marketing push for Facebook Connect, the social network's new data-portability project, goes on. Their angle: It's really easy to install on any site or blog.
A post on Facebook's developer blog contains a video that explains the most basic way to integrate Facebook Connect. The just-under-ten-minute video is the first of several instructional pieces, Facebook engineers said.
Focusing on ease of use is particularly important as Facebook attempts to win over site owners and publishers. There are other data-portability options out there, like OpenID and the just-launched MySpaceID, and Facebook's best bet is to convince the non-social-networking world that Connect is the clean and simple option. There are, after all, loads of non-tech-savvy media properties out there. And Facebook already has an advantage--many of the alternatives just aren't that self-explanatory.
In other news, CNET's Facebook Connect integration went live this week.
As part of the Le Web conference in Paris, News Corp.'s MySpace announced that it has taken a deeper plunge into the data portability pool.
The social network has announced its support for Google Friend Connect, which launched in full last week, and is using the standard to help power a new set of tools called the MySpace Open Platform. In conjunction, MySpace has ditched the distinctly unsexy moniker of "Data Availability" in favor of the new sobriquet "MySpaceID" for its universal log-in project. The Open Platform, in addition to MySpaceID, encompasses its OpenSocial-compatible app platform and the Post To MySpace sharing feature.
Right now, with MySpaceID, members can log in to partner sites with their MySpace usernames and find which of their MySpace friends use those partner sites. In the future, it'll also synchronize feed activity much like the rival Facebook Connect and allow MySpace members to register for third-party site accounts with their MySpace URLs.
Along with Google Friend Connect, MySpaceID was built with open standards OAuth, OpenSocial, and OpenID. MySpace, as well as Google, is one of the founding partners of the OpenSocial Foundation.
MySpace also announced the first two partners for MySpaceID: European mobile giant Vodafone and personalized home page service Netvibes. It still hasn't yet rolled out log-in credentials for the original Data Availability launch partners--Twitter, eBay, and Yahoo--but product manager Max Engel says those are still in the works.
Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect both launched last week, spurring a return to the social-networking turf wars and power struggle for control of the almighty "social graph."
JS-Kit, a start-up that has created an array of social-networking apps for sites to install, has raised $3.6 million in venture funding in a Series B round led by Altos Ventures. Existing investor TEF3 also contributed.
With the funding, JS-Kit plans to make more hires beyond its team of 12 engineers as well as broaden its management team--DataPortability Workgroup organizer Chris Saad has joined the company as an advisor. The company also plans to hone its business-development strategy so that it can reach the magic "profitable" milestone sooner rather than later.
"Each of these areas provides key value to all our publisher partners who can rest assured that we have the development team necessary to continue to support the products, the leadership to execute on an exciting road map, and a sustainable business model to ensure the company's success now and into the future," CEO Khris Loux wrote in an e-mail announcement.
JS-Kit's specialty isn't gimmicky widgets, but rather low-cost add-ons for Web sites, like comments and ratings, that could otherwise be built in-house for a higher tab.
The Run Around, an app created by Facebook to test its Facebook Connect project.
(Credit: Facebook)LONDON--A lot of hands in the audience went up at the Future of Web Apps conference when Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin kicked off his talk at the conference with the question "How many people have built something on Facebook Platform before?"
Fewer went up when Morin then asked the crowd how many had used Facebook Connect, the company's new data-portability initiative. It's live now, he said.
Facebook unveiled Facebook Connect in May amid a flurry of other companies' data-portability announcements, like Google's Friend Connect and MySpace's Data Availability, which has partners like Yahoo and eBay. A few Facebook Connect partners have rolled out already, and others have announced concrete plans--like blog network Gawker Media, which says that commenters will soon be able to use their Facebook log-in credentials.
Though Facebook has a reputation for keeping its user data behind (virtual) closed doors, Morin said that's the opposite of Facebook Connect's aim. "We wanted to take down those walls and make you able to integrate Facebook anywhere on the Web in any way that you want," he said, explaining that Facebook Connect has a trifold aim: transporting your Facebook identity, making your friends lists portable, and seeing detailed activity feeds from what your friends do across the Web.
"If one of your friends did something on the Web, and you don't know about it, did it actually happen?" Morin asked jokingly. But on a more serious note, Facebook Connect could be a formidable threat to social aggregators like FriendFeed if it's deployed widely across the Web. But sites like FriendFeed simply rely on RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Facebook Connect requires active partnerships. That's why Morin's talk was such an important sales pitch for the company: the developer-heavy audience was full of the people whom Morin and his colleagues need to convert.
Demonstrating the integration of Facebook Connect using an internally created sample site called "The Run Around" (it logs workouts) as well as a smattering of examples from partners like Red Bull, Digg, Six Apart, and CBS (which publishes CNET News), Morin emphasized that it's an extremely simple process for developers.
As for privacy, something that has been a big topic for critics of data-portability projects, Morin said Facebook Connect will provide a benefit rather than a drawback. "What we're trying to do here," he said, "is putting the user fully in control. On Facebook, users have a robust set of privacy settings. With Facebook Connect, those privacy settings can transfer directly to your site. We think that's really powerful."
MySpace's Data Availability logo.
MySpace is set to release on Thursday the application programming interface (API) for Data Availability, a developer project that the News Corp.-owned social network announced in early May. Through Data Availability, participating social sites can let users synchronize accounts with MySpace profiles, importing public profile data like photos, interests, and friend lists.
Data Availability's formal launch partners are Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, and News Corp.'s Photobucket, but with the release of the API, any third-party site can have access to it. Authentication is handled through the OAUTH open standard, and controls have been configured so that a high level of coding expertise is not required.
"Our users spend hours updating and making changes to their profiles, uploading content, and building friend relationships," a post on the MySpace developer blog explained. "With your help that data can now be available to MySpace users no matter where they go on the Internet."
But MySpace's project isn't the only one of its kind: rival Facebook has extended its existing API to encompass data portability in the form of "Facebook Connect," and Google has a new project called Friend Connect designed to bring social credentials to otherwise non-social Web sites.
This post was updated at 1:21 p.m. PDT with comment from Tim Kendall.
NEW YORK--It would've been cool: Facebook director of monetization Tim Kendall hinted Monday that the company would offer "a product" to help third-party companies "accelerate" participation in its developer platform when asked whether the company had any plans to start directly monetizing the technology.
Since no further detail was provided, and Kendall had said that this would deal with "whether an application is within Facebook or outside of Facebook," this reporter inferred that he'd meant something involving development assistance for Facebook Connect, its upcoming data portability project. With Facebook Connect, third-party sites will be able to incorporate Facebook identity credentials into their own services.
But the "product" will just involve encouraging them to promote user participation through Facebook Ads, Kendall confirmed to CNET News.com later. He wasn't specifically referring to Facebook Connect. That's something that Facebook has offered since November, and it currently encourages developers to purchase ads to spread the word about marketing campaigns on Facebook's developer platform. Up until this point, the social network hasn't directly profited from its developer platform, and making part of the code open source isn't going to rake in the cash either.
Kendall was speaking on a panel at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's IAB Leadership Forum on User-Generated Content & Social Media here.
Facebook, like most other social-media companies, has not had particularly stellar revenues. The IAB conference on Monday was designed to address that issue, and possible solutions, for New York's ad industry.
Some companies have already had successful advertising campaigns by using Facebook's developer platform for free, Kendall said. One of them is FedEx, he said, which allows users to package up a selection of virtual "gifts" or any other kind of digital attachment into a "virtual FedEx package" and share it with their friends on the social network.
"It's gimmicky, but it's a great example of leveraging the hooks that Facebook provides, creating social context," Kendall explained, "and FedEx does a great job of subtly incorporating their brand into the whole experience."
