Facebook Is on the Board. And Now?

February 6, 2009 in OpenID by Carsten Pötter | Comments

facebook

Yesterday – or today, if you’re living on the other side of the pond – Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation as a sustaining corporate board member, just a week after PayPal also joined the board. I certainly see why the OpenID Foundation is excited about its new member. Facebook is very popular and the announcement could give OpenID another boost.

Though what does it mean? Will Facebook accept OpenID logins? Will it rebuild Facebook Connect with OpenID baked in? Well, I don’t know. Neither Facebook’s nor the OpenID Foundation’s blog posts mention it. Rather they concentrate on user experience.

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. As a first step, Facebook will be hosting a design summit next week[...]

That’s not bad at all. A better user experience for OpenID is needed and should be focused on to attract more users. But I would really like to see actual support of the technology, i.e. use of it within the product. In the past, many people criticized that big companies like Yahoo! only become OpenID Providers but not accepting OpenID’s from other Providers on their services. Is it enough to join the OpenID Foundation now (PayPal also hasn’t announced any implementation of the technology yet)? I hope Kaliya Hamlin is not right when writing:

The power and potential of OpenID was that ANYONE with a domain name could use it – now it seems more and more like just the big “brands” silo’s are making it work for them and well maybe if you are a super hacker you could do your own (but we won’t “trust” you). I am worried that the movement seems to be moving away from empowering everyone with a blog or even those without “blogs” establishing their own node in the network.

The OpenID Foundation has to get the balance right between attracting bigger companies to become board members – which also means financial support – and supporting users with their daily experiences with OpenID.

Tags: Facebook, OIDF, OpenID, OpenID Foundation, sustaining corporate board member, Yahoo

  • Hi Carsten,

    at the first moment i heard from this news i was very surprised and amused, But: don't you think supporting the OpenID-Foundation could be only a kind of marketing strategy (in german i would say: Es gehört wohl gerade zum guten Ton dort beizutreten).
    I will believe, that facebook accepts OpenID-Logins if they really do.
  • Of course, Facebook might just jumping on the bandwagon. On the other hand, one of the Facebook engineers, Luke Shepard, was running for one of the community board seats, Dave Morin offered help on the specs a couple of months ago, and Facebook was already presenting at the OpenID UX summit at Yahoo! last year. So there is interest in OpenID at Facebook.

    It certainly depends on what Facebook will do in the future. BTW, my friend, Thomas Huhn, has a great post on Facebook and OpenID on the OpenID Directory blog. Worth reading: http://blog.openiddirectory.com/2009/02/06/face...
  • To see an integrated Facebook and OpenID login in production, check out any of the following websites:

    http://uservoice.com/session/new
    https://www.mixx.com/login?return=http%3A%2F%2F...
    http://www.kalydo.com/#openid
    http://www.interscope.com/
  • Yep, RPX is a good product. Relying Parties don't have to decide if they want to implement OpenID or Facebook Connect. Though it doesn't mean Facebook is providing OpenIDs. ;)
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