San Francisco — Many major Web companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and few others, have long back announced their support for OpenID, but for the last couple of years, Facebook has been acting somewhat indifferently with the possibility of supporting the OpenID log-in standard. However, on Monday the massive social network widely opened the doors of its ultra-walled-garden approach to data and user experience finally adopted OpenID, the open user-identity framework to simplify how people register for and log into the social networking site.
To begin with, new users will now be able to register for Facebook with their Gmail accounts or link their Facebook accounts with any OpenID provider.
This means that users will be able to sign into Facebook using their log-in certification from Gmail. “This is a quicker, more efficient way for new users to register for the site, find their friends and start exploring,” Facebook explained in a blog post later Monday.
Henceforth, users will be able to connect their Facebook accounts with their Gmail accounts or with accounts from other online services that support OpenID automatic log-ins, according to Facebook. This linkage automatically logs people into Facebook when they sign in to those other OpenID-supported accounts.
“We certainly hope that openness and open standards foster a strong developer community with shared goals and interests,” Facebook wrote in a blog post. “We have 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.
Facebook entered the realm 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 have always empowered 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.”
“During test run, we have noticed that first-time users who register on the site with OpenID are more likely to become active Facebook users,” the blog said. “They get up and running after registering even faster than before, find their friends easily, and quickly engage on the site.”
Facebook promised more integration in the future — Giving more explanation on how it works, from Facebook:
“Existing and new users can now link their Facebook accounts with their Gmail accounts or with accounts from those OpenID providers that support automatic login. Once a user links his or her account with a Gmail address or an OpenID URL, logs in to that account, then goes to Facebook, that user will already be logged in to Facebook.”
The enforcement does not appears to be live yet for everyone, but the focus on Gmail is especially interesting, given Google, through Friend Connect, is a bit of a competitor to Facebook, and Facebook, MySpace, and Google are all offering identity platforms of their own that would seemingly compete with OpenID.
The decision is the latest from Facebook to make itself more harmonious with third-party sites and services, and thus simplify life for users struggling to manage and remember myriad passwords and user names to social networks, e-mail accounts, multimedia sharing sites and the like.
Facebook mentioned in its blog post 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.”
Yahoo adopted OpenID in January 2008, and Microsoft, IBM, Google, and VeriSign followed suit a month later. MySpace issued its support in July 2008.
That could be a hard-boiled nod to the fact that OpenID, founded in 2005, has historically been a bit difficult for the non-tech-savvy to comprehend.