06 February 2009, 09:58

Facebook joins OpenID board

Facebook is the latest large company to join the OpenID Foundation's board as a sustaining corporate member. In a blog post, Facebook's Mike Schroepfer (formerly of Mozilla), said, "We see great opportunities to increase our contributions across the open stack, and to continue our work with the open source community to evolve existing projects." The current sustaining corporate members are PayPal, Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo.

Schroepher said "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,". One question that is still unanswered is how will OpenID and Facebook Connect, a competing identity format, be tied together. OpenID Foundation board members David Recordon and Chris Messina, in the OpenID blog post, said "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,".

See also: