The OpenID Foundation has just announced that Facebook’s Luke Shepard will be joining the OpenID board as a corporate member, and that Facebook has made a $50,000 donation to the cause. The news marks the first time Facebook has officially signed on with the campaign, though some of its employees have been actively involved with improving the open standard for some time.
At this point it’s unclear exactly what change this will bring to Facebook. Facebook’s increasingly popular Connect product, which allows users to secure use their Facebook ID’s as logins across over 4,000 sites (including ours), is a closed and proprietary system. But it is also very well designed – members from the Facebook Connect team have given several talks in the hopes of improving the OpenID effort, and are holding an event on the topic next week. From Facebook’s development blog:
As we’ve launched and built Facebook Connect, we’ve been participants in OpenID efforts. One of our user experience experts, Julie Zhuo, presented at the UX Summit in October. Several of our engineers have been participating in meetups, and one of them ran as a community member for a board seat. We’re happy to announce today that we are formalizing our support of the OpenID Foundation by officially joining the board. 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. As a next step in that effort, we will be hosting an OpenID Design Summit next week here at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto.
Facebook is apparently “building up momentum towards their adoption of OpenID as a standard”, but that too is ambiguous – many companies have signed on as “issuing parties”, meaning they’ll allow their IDs to be used elsewhere. But far fewer have been “accepting parties”, which means that accounts from other sites can be used to log-in to their services. OpenID has long been exploited by major internet brands who have pledged support to the cause (and reaped the positive press), only to put their plans on the backburner indefinitely. That said, even if Facebook doesn’t wind up implementing OpenID, it sounds like they’ll at least help make it a little easier to use.
Can’t wait to see what they have in store for us.
We had a choice between FB Connect and OpenID and went with FB Connect because after doing brief QA no one knew what OpenID is which is pretty horrible.
Power.com has openid solved.
IdentityLocator.com – who’s who
Facebook Connect has already killed OpenID… it’s just that OpenID pundits still haven’t figured that out.
Coincidentally, OpenID people still think that OpenID is great and easy to use… LMAO!
I think many people in the OpenID community – and certainly myself – understand that the user experience needs to improve and it must become easier to use. This is one of the many reasons I’m excited to be working with Facebook on making it happen!
I agree, a parrtership with facebook will certainly improve the OpenID experience.
You should also have a Luke based feed on techcrunch.
Connecting with Facebook is a great idea…OpenID will finally take off !!!
I wonder what will “the others” do…myspace, hi5, orkut etc…
http://www.livbit.com
OpenID can work really well what facebook need to work out is how to get published in the resource part of the OpenID and how they can be a consumer and a provider
NO One is going to allow their credit cards to facebook it’s been shown to be the case but I dont mind certain shops knowing my facebook url
this is the distributed identity frameworks at work
if I can login to a shop and send my details etc and as a side note depending on what level of Identity I choose let them know my facebook ID and auth them all the better !
regards
John Jones
And they are going to share credit cards with ‘open’Id?
This helps OpenID more honestly. Facebook connect has been a roaring success!
cooljobsalways
http://tinyurl.com/7uj5ay
What is the point? They already have connect.
I’d be more excited if my experience of OpenID wasn’t so overwhelmingly confusing. You come across a new site to play around with, maybe simply leave a comment, etc… They ask you for your OpenID login OR a choose from an OpenID supported site… The trouble it, there are a few… So when returning to the site later (twitterfeed.com in my case), I had to login in a couple times before I found what I was looking for… You can successfully log in under different affiliates and the data isn’t shared… Does that make sense? (If I log in via Flickr, there are no twitterfeeds setup, if I login via SmugMug, there it is…)
As long as Open-ID does not offer a significant value for users it will not succeed. The last time I checked, there where simply not enough sites I use represented there.
Hence f Connect is a chance for both companies to build a larger network with a good brand recognition.
I agree. It seems OpenId people did not have too much experience managing user identity at the beginning so it was really hard to use. 2 years has passed and the adoption is still very slow. Whereas facebook connect is being integrated by thousands of small sites instantly.
It’s kinda amazing that their team did great job on every single project.
That sound great!
Well, this is hilarious, why? Simply because, many (TechCrunch included) instead of adopting OpenID that is around for several years now, prefer to use Facebook Connect. Maybe because it seems too Open(not true at all), maybe because it does not recruit matricola like Facebook, nonetheless this it is a valid technology and I’m happy that FB is moving towards that direction… against the tendency …
Interesting.
To see an integrated Facebook and OpenID login in production, check out any of the following websites:
http://uservoic...com/session/new
https://www.mix...www.mixx.com%2F
http://www.kalydo.com/#openid
http://www.interscope.com/
We discussed exactly this in our podcast this week.. if anything facebook will become just another OpenID provider.
Check what JanRain is oding with RPXNOW – interesting http://www.rpxnow.com – but i’m also intrigued by how they will be able to support enhanced features of the various providers (fb, myspace, google, yahoo…) – for me the key is not only providing access but also aloowing content from site flow into fb etc…
This would be cool.