New York — Facebook has become the latest board member to join the OpenID Foundation, the open user-authentication system, following the footsetps of tech giants such as Google, IBM, MySpace, Microsoft, Yahoo and VeriSign in a drive to give internet users a single digital identity to access many of the web’s services.
Social networking site exhibits commitment to single sign-on.
The move comes as a bit of surprise because Facebook has developed its own universal log-in standard, called “Facebook Connect,” which basically 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.
“It is our wish that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to create an easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web,” Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s director of engineering, wrote in a blog post.
Facebook Connect empowers users to make available their profile information on different Web sites across the Internet, register and sign in to the third-party sites using their Facebook login, access their friend lists, and share their present browsing activities on the connected sites with chosen friends.
Facebook said that it will organize an OpenID Design Summit next week at its headquarters in California to present its new affiliation.
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.
“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,” board members David Recordon of SixApart and Chris Messina of Vidoop, wrote in a blog post.
The board also includes of members from Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal, VeriSign, and Yahoo in addition to 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.
Announced via a blog post, Facebook’s Schroepfer mentioned that Facebook Connect has seen 4000 sites and desktop applications within two months since the service is introduced, but reveals:
“We are 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.”
A Facebook spokesperson claimed that joining the OpenID board was “the first move towards becoming more open”.
"The summit will bring out some of the top designers from Facebook, the DiSo Project, Google, JanRain, MySpace, Six Apart and Yahoo, focusing on how existing OpenID implementations could support an experience similar to Facebook Connect,” Recordon and Messina wrote.
“The major set of services and APIs we have introduced have allowed a thriving ecosystem to emerge,” wrote Schroepfer. “In our view, the success of the Platform community is a result of the strength of the products we produce, the opportunities provided to developers, and the value they deliver to users.”
Yahoo linked up with OpenID in January 2008, and Microsoft, IBM, Google, and VeriSign followed suit a month later. MySpace issued its support in July 2008.
Andrew Nash, senior director of information risk management at PayPal, also joined the board in late January 2009.
Facebook had previously been considered too proprietary because of its Connect offering.