Facebook opens arms to OpenID

Facebook announced today it has become an OpenID "relying party", meaning it's started to deploy support for the standard.

For the past few years, Facebook has been flirting with the possibility of supporting the OpenID log-in standard, which calls itself "an open, decentralised, free framework for user-centric digital identity" without actually building support for it. Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation in February, even though many considered its Facebook Connect log-in standard to be a proprietary competitor.

But, today's announcement suggests Facebook believes the two can work in tandem.

A post on the Facebook blog read: "We've always let our users express their real world connections.

"From the beginning, Facebook users could use their college and workplace identities to establish real world networks. Now, they can use open standards to establish their identities on Facebook."

Most notably, you can now register for a Facebook account with your Gmail account, or can link an existing Facebook account with Gmail or other OpenID-participating services if they support automatic log-in.

"We've always believed that making the user experience as secure, lightweight and intuitive as possible, which 200 million people can comfortably enjoy and understand, is one of our top priorities," the blog post read.

Facebook's blog post also said that security concerns have been an issue. In working with the OpenID community, "we shared our experience developing Facebook Connect, where we eventually came up with a design that ensures that users would know that they were providing their login credentials to Facebook, and not some unscrupulous site".

Facebook's tests have indicated that if new users can register with an existing web service account, like Gmail, that they are more likely to stick around.

Original article: OpenID comes to Facebook, at last from CNET News.com