Facebook Shows Support For OpenID

Facebook is among the many large sites that have recently jumped on the OpenID bandwagon. Facebooks Luke Shepard has officially joined the OpenID board as a corporate member and a a result will offer OpenID to its community.

Facebook CEO also joined the OpenID board of directors and donated $50,000 to support the cause.

As weve launched and built Facebook Connect, weve 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. Were 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 is an open, decentralized user identification standard, allowing users to log onto many services with the same digital identity.

An OpenID is in the form of a URL, and is unique in that the user is authenticated by their 'OpenID provider' (that is, the entity hosting their OpenID URL). The OpenID protocol does not rely on a central authority to authenticate a user's identity. Since neither the OpenID protocol nor web sites requiring identification may mandate a specific type of authentication, non-standard forms of authentication can be used, such as smart cards, biometrics, or ordinary passwords.