
Facebook joins OpenID Foundation Board - arjunb
http://openid.net/2009/02/05/facebook-joins-openid-foundation-board/
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jrockway
It's important to note that Microsoft is a member of the W3C. Being a member
of an organization doesn't mean you are going to use or enhance any of the
organization's technologies.

It will be good if people can start logging on to "real" sites with an OpenID.
But I have a feeling Facebook only wants OpenID so that people can use their
facebook password to log on "everywhere". This is how Google "supports" OpenID
also.

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unalone
Forgive me for naivete, but isn't that the point of OpenID? Using one account
to log in everywhere? Or am I mistaken about something?

Further, OpenID is about positively identifying somebody online. Since
Facebook has one of the stricter naming policies online, isn't that a good
thing that they want to make Facebook IDs more openly available?

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jrockway
Yes, but the point is that right now, everyone provides an OpenID, but they
don't let you log in with OpenID. So OpenID is essentially worthless, since
you can't actually _use_ it anywhere.

It will become very worthwhile when major sites start letting me use it to log
in.

(I always compare OpenID to email. Going with that analogy, right now, every
site gives you an email address that anyone can send to. But each site will
only send e-mail to its own addresses, completely eliminating any value.)

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jwilliams
Yeah - although I'm starting to find that sites using OpenID 2.0 to have a
good user experience. e.g. <http://www.plaxo.com>

I'm not really a heavy user of it, I probably wouldn't have joined - but they
make it ridiculously easy to register.

We're taking on OpenID 2.0 as part our our development as a consequence. I
know it has it's drawbacks, but as you say, getting the penetration up front
is key.

Either way - hopefully a sign of things to come.

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unalone
I dislike Plaxo. Just as OpenOffice is what I look at as an example of the
worst of Open Source, Plaxo is my posterchild example of OpenID.

It adds nothing. First it was an address book in the midst of a sea of similar
address books. It added OpenID to gain an "edge" and it got publicity despite
its still having a meaningless featurelist. Plaxo 3 added Pulse, which is just
a watered-down FriendFeed, which is a pretty watered-down site to begin with.
It's ugly - it was obviously design-by-committee, which made it incredibly
harmless and hideously generic - it adds nothing, and it has uglier ads than
most of the sites it's ripping off. The name is _terrible_. It's the ultimate
example of the meaningless short name.

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kwamenum86
Great- this means that everyone needs to start taking OpenID seriously. I'm
not sure what incentive there is for Facebook to join the OpenSocial movement
since, given enough time, Facebook Connect could easily become the standard
open login protocol. If Facebook's goal is to integrate OpenSocial into
Facebook then they could have skipped a huge headache for themselves and
developers (in the form of a herky-jerky start) by simply going with OpenSoc
from the beginning.

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mtrichardson
OpenSocial and OpenID aren't really related (except that they are both part of
the open stack).

Facebook can easily continue to do whatever they want with their API and still
do OpenID. It would be nice, however, if they did a hybrid OpenID/OAuth flow
and then have an OpenSocial API that you could get access to with the oauth
token. The user experience would be pretty much the same.

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kwamenum86
They are not related but they are analogs to Facebook platform and Facebook
Connect respectively.

[edit] Ah I see why you wrote that. I was writing/thinking about two protocols
at once and came out with an incoherent comment.

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markup
Looks like 2009 is going to be (open) identity year? If only the big ones
started to accept third party openid to login to their services...

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Raphael
This year is definitely make-or-break for Facebook. And their business seems
to be based around personal identity. If Facebook could take over credit card
transactions similar to PayPal, it could be big for a long time.

