Facebook joins OpenID Foundation Board | Hacker News Reader

Facebook joins OpenID Foundation Board

openid.net

10 pointsarjunb12 comments

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.

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?

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.)

Aha, gotcha.

It's good for smaller sites, though. If I want to bootstrap my users and I'm going for a Facebook-like crowd, having instant access via Facebook ID might be nice to have.

Yes, definitely. For any public site I develop, I use OpenID logins exclusively. (Most of the "real" work I do involves non-public applications, and OpenID just doesn't fit there. But for sites that I want my IRC buddies to use, OpenID is the best solution -- easy to implement, and it means the users can spend their time playing with the site, not waiting for the e-mail confirmation message.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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