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Later today Facebook will officially become an OpenID relying party. What does that mean? It means that if you wish to register for Facebook using another OpenID provider, you can. Initially the service will not be completely open though. As Facebook will post later today, “To start, new users can now register for Facebook with their Gmail accounts, and existing users can link their Facebook accounts with any OpenID provider to connect with friends and eliminate the need for multiple sign-ins.”
A few weeks ago Facebook officially announced that their OpenID support would go live and today it has become official. The initial concept is to be able to login using your external account and avoid the need to remember multiple passwords and account addresses. While many people simply use an existing email and the same password for practically every account, remember passwords can quickly become annoying.
That’s why Facebook has decided to launch their support of OpenID. What’s interesting about this is that once you are logged in to your OpenID account, you will automatically be logged in to Facebook as well. This also means that you’ll be logged in for all Facebook Connect sites that you’ve previously registered for making the login process much more simplified.
Facebook has been continuing to support open standards and this is a sign of things to come. Facbeook also announced that they would support the new Activity Streams service when they launched the new stream.get and stream.publish methods a few weeks ago. Let us know if you get a chance to test out the new OpenID implementation. We’d love to hear what you think about it.
I am wondering when Facebook creates their own open authentication service.
When email becomes too junky, it would be nice to just use my Facebook inbox. And have a simple email like mager@facebook.com.
This is awesome! Great news.
Now Windows Live either hurry up with there OpenID implementation (http://dev.live.com/blogs/devlive/archive/2008/10/27/421.aspx) or i wait till LiveID supported
For OpenID i so spoiled for options (Google, AOL and Yahoo [with Windows Live whenever they get round to it *eyerolls*) OpenID really need a ‘linkID’ feature to a openid similar to how liveid can link multiple LiveIDs.
OpenID provides delegation support, which lets you declare that a certain OpenID is an alias for another. This means you can use your homepage as an OpenID without running any software, making it point to an actual OpenID provider’s page.
This is not quite account consolidation, but in my opinion it’s actually superior.
It’s OpenID without the “Open”. You can login with your Google OpenID. What good is that? The whole premise of OpenID is decentralization. Give me a break.
This is really great…but I’ve not been able to find it in the login page for Facebook. :-s
when are they going to set it up so people can use thier facebook login as an openid? i dont think they will, since that would be in direct competition with facebook connect. well i for one will not use facebook connect, openid is much better from a developers prospective.
great, nice redisign by the way
I can’t find it..
where is it??
Arifn: it’s found in your My Account page under Linked Accounts.
In general, I wonder if facebook really turn all those so called geeky GMail lovers from it. it has along way to go if it can technically compete with GMail. Nonetheless, as mentioned here, it will sure get some young users to it.
Further, I’m wondering why is Yahoo showing such a big warning when I tried to incorporate Yahoo and facebook.
and, why is facebook interested in linking mySpace as well?
in my opinion, this is an attempt by facebook to directly attract users of these sites to them. the all supported sites have one big thing in common. they have your contacts list!!!!
@Neill:
Great redesign. Add an option to edit posted messages for mistakes.
It appears that their open id account linking doesn’t yet support delegation!
When talking about ‘Open ID’ just wondering how much open the ‘ID’ really stands. I notice that many contributors to open id still have not uploaded their Photographs, then how much more their particulars.
http://bit.ly/inPXX
The first step toward Facebook becoming an OpenID Provider is underway. In order to get an ID like myname@facebook.com you first have to choose your username. This page lets you choose yours:
http://www.facebook.com/username/
I can’t get this to work. When I link my Google account, a browser window titled “OpenID Receiver” opens which is blank. When I close it the FB account settings page says it was unsuccessfull. When I log back into FB, it says it’s liked to Google but when I sign into GMail and then open FB in a new tab, I need to sign into FB.
I’ve tried this on 3 different computers all running XP and used IE7, Firefox, and Chrome. Can anyone help?
Hi,
I just created an openID at verisign and tied it to my (newly created) FB-account. In different browsers, I first logged in into my verisign OpenID and afterward opening FB. But everytime FB asks me to log in with my FB credentials. I’m not going to enter my verisign-creds into that FB-login fields. If that’s what I’m supposed to do to use openID, than it is implemented absolutely the wrong way by FB.
Just checked again. You have to login at your Provider manually and afterwards just call the Facebook startpage. You will be logged in automatically if you have registered your openID with Facebook before.
With all respect to the folks at facebook, I have to say that your current OpenID integration is less than useful.
You rely on a cookie that is stored on the local PC to determine whether to use an OpenID based authentication scheme.
Could you, in addition, just provide a button on the login screen? Below the username and password fields, couldn’t you just have a little button to ask users to login with OpenID and prompt for the OpenID name?
As currently implemented, the system RELIES on the existence of a cookie to indicate that Facebook should use OpenID.
That’s not very useful, IMHO.
Read more about why at http://hypecycles.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/facebook-openid-is-dumb/
amrith
Facebook doesn’t seem to get OpenID, or maybe they’ve had their heads too wrapped up by their obsession with User eXperience and Single Sign-On, that they fail to see where they’ve missed the point.
One of the key benefit of OpenID is the promise to bypass a registration process. Do you have an OpenId account? Cool, just use it and you’re in. That’s it, that’s all.
Facebook, is trying to emulate with OpenID what they’re imposing to all their minion sites using Facebook-Connect: Single Sign-On via cookie. The benefit? You save 1 mouse click at the login. Yay, I really needed that! It’s about as useful as those applications that startup during Windows boots up process!
In the mean time, if you don’t want to save that setting in a cookie (maybe for the valid reason that you don’t want to be considered logged in to facebook just because you just logged in to gmail), you won’t be able to connect to facebook with an OpenID. Big Fail!
As for Facebook-Connect, I recently had to work at integrating it to a set of authentication solutions. As a developer I can honestly say that it’s hard to work with when it comes to authentication.
Finally, some of the AAAs have adult day programs at which veterans participate. ,
HIIIIIII