Facebook surprises with OpenID membership

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 6 Feb 2009 at 14:59

Facebook has joined the OpenID Foundation, the company has announced.

The move will come as a shock to many, given that Facebook's own Friend Connect has been going head-to-head with OpenID to become the internet's unified log-in standard.

Facebook claims Friend Connect has been adopted by 4,000 websites since launch. However, the proprietary technology underpinning the service has angered rivals, especially given the open-source nature of OpenID.

Facebook has not confirmed, or even suggested, any plans to make the two standards compatible, but it has agreed to host a summit and meet with OpenID's big hitters, including Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal and Yahoo.

This could be an attempt to head off further criticism, and the company is certainly making all the right conciliatory noises.

"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," says Facebook's Mike Schroepfer, a former Mozilla man.

It is a sentiment echoed by OpenID advocates: "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," says the Foundation's David Recordon and Chris Messina.