As competitors MySpace and Google add the ability to move data around the Web, social-networking leader Facebook is following suit with its Facebook Connect network, which relies on identities created and formatted using OpenID. In the next stage of building open distributed-identity frameworks across the Internet, Facebook officially joins the board of the OpenID Foundation.On Feb. 5, Facebook announced that it would join Google, IBM,
Microsoft, PayPal, VeriSign and Yahoo as a corporate board member of the OpenID
Foundation, an organization formed in June 2007 to promote an open framework
for user-centric digital identities on the Web.
Facebook joins two months after its Facebook
Connect, which enables users to sign into other sites using their Facebook
user names and passwords, went live. Some 4,000 sites and desktop applications are
currently involved in Facebook Connect, and the company claims it has utility
for the enterprise.
Facebook Connect offers enterprises "a more robust intranet with social
capabilities to interact," David Swain, manager of platform connections
for Facebook, said in an interview. "The enterprise could use their own authentication
system and then have their [employees] use Connect from there, or they could
use Facebook's authentication system."
Google's own social networking effort, Google
Friend Connect, already uses OpenID as a foundation; the service launched
as a beta hours before Facebook Connect on Dec. 4.
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