Facebook Announces Users Will Soon Be Able to Login to Facebook Via OpenID
Less than three months after joining the OpenID Foundation’s board as a sustaining corporate member (i.e. putting its weight and financial support behind OpenID), Facebook has just announced at the “technology tasting” event this afternoon at its Palo Alto headquarters that users will soon be able to log in to Facebook with their OpenID.
Facebook is becoming what is known as an OpenID “relying party,” meaning users will be able to log in to Facebook with their OpenID from any provider – including Google, Yahoo, AOL, or MySpace. Facebook will automatically check to see if users have logged into any OpenID account when they hit Facebook.com, and give them the option to automatically login to Facebook without entering new information. In addition, users will be able to shortcut the registration flow by authenticating with Facebook using their OpenID.
“We’ve been thinking a lot about the user experience for OpenID. There’s been a lot of experimentation, but federated identity is a complicated problem,” Facebook engineer Luke Shephard said. “Facebook has always relied on external identity. When we looked at OpenID, we asked what is the minimum amount of functionality we could implement to provide some value to users.”
“We believe that the majority of the sharing that’s going to happen in the world isn’t going to be on any one site. That’s why building a platform and having it be interoperable is important for how the web developers and for us strategically,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
Historically, Facebook has been hesitant to integrate OpenID either as an issuing party or relying party due to the user experience complexities it presents. For example, here’s what OpenID login looks like on Twitterfeed, a popular application for publishing blog post notifications via Twitter:
Facebook’s announcement is a major bolster to the OpenID movement, which hopes to create an “open, decentralized, free” framework for user identity across the web. The OpenID Foundation was formed in 2007 to help promote the OpenID technologies and community, and is currently governed by 7 community elected board members and 7 corporate board members. Shephard, a “huge internal advocate for OpenID,” serves as Facebook’s representative.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
[...] – Luke Shephard from the Facebook Platform team is talking about OpenID. Facebook users will soon be able to login to Facebook with their OpenID. See our full story. [...]
April 27th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
[...] great day for OpenID: Facebook, one of the world’s biggest social networks, is adopting the standard as a Relying Party. That means Facebook members can log in to the site with an OpenID from providers like Yahoo!, [...]
April 27th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
[...] When Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation in February, it was unclear how the company would support OpenID. Yesterday it announced that it will become a Relying Party. [...]
April 27th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Great news for Facebook members, potential members, and the OpenID community. Well done to the Facebook team!
April 27th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
I have plenty of OpenID Providers to choose from but the service i use most excluding Twitter & Facebook is Windows Live and this reminds me Windows Live OpenID 2.0 Provider ‘inspirations’
Last October they (Windows Live) announced they were sometime in 2009 OpenID will be by ‘converting’ (only word coming to mind to describe ‘process’) there windows live ids so they become openid 2.0 compatible ones but has since gone quiet so reminds me i should try and ‘remind’ them (@windowslive & @liveframework) for an update
Other Windows Live news (Facebook related) is the new Facebook Web Activity which is apart of the ‘wave 2′ release of new services for Windows Live Home/Profile @windowslive
April 28th, 2009 at 12:11 am
[...] Erst vor wenigen Stunden gab Facebook die Öffnung seines Newsfeeds für externe Applikationen bekannt, doch damit scheinen die signifikanten Neuerungen beim größten sozialen Netzwerk der Welt (außerhalb Chinas) für heute noch nicht abgeschlossen zu sein. Wie Michael Arrington bei TechCrunch berichtet, wird der US-Dienst in Kürze die Unterstützung von OpenID bekannt geben. Update: Mittlerweile wurde dies von Facebook bestätigt. [...]
April 28th, 2009 at 5:01 am
@Jamie Ellis: For any website operator wanting to accept Windows LiveID, OpenID, or Facebook Connect, you might want to check out http://rpxnow.com, a free service for third party registration and login.
April 28th, 2009 at 6:39 am
I guess this makes FB the first really big endorsement of OpenID then right?
April 28th, 2009 at 7:44 am
[...] be able to sign in to #facebook using an !openid – http://ur1.ca/3rww I’m [...]
April 28th, 2009 at 9:03 am
[...] news that Facebook will allow users to log into Facebook with a 3rd party OpenID may sound alike a technical detail but it is a really big deal. One of the crippling aspects of the [...]
April 28th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
That really a great news about Facebook and OpenID. We will be able to integrate Strong Authentication (2FA) soon.
April 28th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Very good news! In the future, nobody will believe that each site had its own identification system!
April 28th, 2009 at 11:56 pm
[...] Facebook in naher Zukunft auch selbst auf OpenID umstellen würde. Seit Montag ist jetzt klar, dass Facebook an einem OpenID-Login arbeitet, der hoffentlich auch irgendwann ein fester Bestandteil von Facebook-Connect [...]
April 29th, 2009 at 2:23 am
[...] dieser Woche hat Facebook bekanntgegeben, das Single-Sign-On Verfahren von OpenID vollständig zu implementieren. Dies ist [...]
April 29th, 2009 at 4:44 am
[...] So far the vast majority of OpenID announcements by the big players have been to be yet another OP, or just signing up for the OpenID Foundation. It looks like the game is finally changing. Apparently Facebook is getting ready to become an OpenID Relying Party. From Inside Facebook: [...]
April 29th, 2009 at 5:08 am
[...] I just read over at Jeff Bohren’s Identity Blogger that Facebook is going to become an OpenID relying party. According to Inside Facebook: [...]
April 29th, 2009 at 9:30 am
[...] Facebook and OpenID — For privacy reasons, I’m not a Facebook user. Those many millions that are on Facebook can look forward them become a Relying Party and start to accept OpenIDs from other providers. [...]
April 29th, 2009 at 11:10 am
[...] Inside Facebook: Less than three months after joining the OpenID Foundation’s board as a sustaining corporate [...]
May 5th, 2009 at 3:00 am
[...] Facebook Announces Users Will Soon Be Able to Login to Facebook Via OpenID (insidefacebook.com) [...]
May 5th, 2009 at 4:07 am
[...] Facebook Announces Users Will Soon Be Able to Login to Facebook Via OpenIDApril 28, 2009 [...]
May 18th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
[...] month, Facebook announced that users would soon be able to login to the site via OpenID. Today, Facebook has officially [...]
May 20th, 2009 at 12:16 am
[...] aver introdotto circa un mese fa OpenID, Facebook implementa adesso la possibilità per gli utenti di accedere al Social Network con [...]
August 24th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
[...] this year, Facebook joined the OpenID board of directors as a corporate sustaining member, and said that users would soon thereafter be able to login to the [...]
August 25th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
I have a New e-mail address. see to my facebook friends will send all facebook mail to the new one