Only one week after PayPal joined the board of the OpenID Foundation as a sustaining corporate member, Facebook followed suit yesterday. It is the first social network to become a board member.
By joining the board Facebook hopes
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.
While it is excting to see a popular brand like Facebook joining the board of the OpenID Foundation, it has not made any announcement if it will implement OpenID in any way. So if you hoped to login to the social network with your OpenID already, you will be disappointed. Though it would be awesome if it was possible someday, of course. In the meantime Facebook’s experiences with Facebook Connect and user experience could help OpenID become more user friendly. It seems this is what the OpenID Foundation is hoping for as well:
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.
Anyway, we definitely hope Facebook’s contribution to OpenID will further its success.
