Facebook officially supports OpenID
Facebook’s Luke Shepard has officially joined the OpenID board as a corporate member. In addition to the Shepard addition to the board, Facebook made a $50,000 donation to the cause, pledging its support financially as well.
Facebook employees have been actively involved in the OpenID project for some time, but this is the first time the company has officially signed on for the project and in effect “put their money where their mouth is.”
Facebook spoke about the new commitment to OpenID on the Facebook blog:
“As we’ve launched and built Facebook Connect, we’ve been participants in OpenID efforts. One of our user experience experts, Julie Zhuo, presented at the UX Summit in October. Several of our engineers have been participating in meetups, and one of them ran as a community member for a board seat. 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. As a next step in that effort, we will be hosting an OpenID Design Summit next week here at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto.”
OpenID has been trying to become a standard for quite some time now. With backing from a company as large as Facebook, it has a chance of making a serious impact. While quite a few companies have allowed their log-on’s to be used on other sites, very few have actually said they will take log-ons from other sites on theirs. If Facebook were to do that, it would be a huge step in making OpenID a reality.
What do you think about OpenID? Would you like to see OpenID happen? If not, what issues do you see with the idea?
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