Facebook announced that it’s joining the OpenID Foundation
Posted by Andrew Wayman on February 6th, 2009
Facebook and OpenId Logos
Facebook announced that it’s joining the OpenID Foundation – an interesting move considering that Facebook Connect, the company’s identity platform for third-party websites, has so far looked like more of a competitor to OpenID than an ally. This also opens up some interesting questions about Facebook and OpenSocial. Facebook has said they are open to one day joining OpenSocial or making the two platforms compatible, I can help but wonder if this is a positive move to that end goal (or a clever stalling tactic).
In a blog post, Facebook writes “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.” However, the company stops short of announcing plans to either become an identity provider for OpenID, or, allowing people to use OpenID to login to Facebook.
To be honest, I still have doubts. The Facebook Connect experience is simply better than that offered by OpenID, and from a competitive standpoint, Facebook has an opportunity to be the standard identity provider for other websites. While goodwill can created by joining the OpenID Foundation and sharing what the industry likes to call “best practices,” at this point, Facebook actually implementing OpenID would be a far bigger boon to OpenID than it would be to Facebook, and hence, I don’t see it happening any time soon. I just hope they don’t take a page out of Googles book.
-Andrew Wayman
Tags: ally, best practices, blog, boon, competitor, facebook, frameworks, goodwill, interesting questions, logos, openid, party websites, platforms, standpoint, tactic, third party
