The day after Facebook’s 5th birthday, I join David Recordon and the rest of the board of the OpenID Foundation in welcoming Facebook as our newest member, in rapid succession to Paypal just a few weeks ago. The significance of both of these companies investing in and becoming part of the OpenID family can not be understated.
I’m particularly excited that Facebook has joined after the conversation that Dave Morin and I had last Friday during our Jelly Talk. Dave and I were in vehement agreement about a lot of things, and tantamount was the need for the user experience of OpenID authentication to improve.
The crux of the issue is that with OpenID, choice is baked in, which is a good thing for the marketplace and ultimately a good thing for users. The problem is how this choice manifests itself in interfaces.
Facebook Connect is simple because there is no choice: you click a button. Of course, that button only works for the growing subset of the web who have Facebook accounts and want to share their Facebook identity with the web site displaying the button, but that’s why their experience trumps that of OpenID’s. If you take away user choice, everything becomes simple.
But I believe that we can do better than that, and that we can arrive at a satisfying user experience for OpenID that doesn’t necessarily have to dispense with choice. And from the sound of our conversation on Friday, and with Facebook’s membership in the OpenID Foundation, I believe that we now have a mandate to confront this challenge head-on, as a top priority.
To that end, Facebook will be hosting the second User Experience Summit for OpenID on February 10th. The goal is to convene some of the best designers that leading internet companies can muster, and bring them together to develop a series of guidelines, best practices, iterations, and interfaces for making OpenID not just suck less, but become a great experience (in same vein as the hybrid OpenID/OAuth flow that we saw from Plaxo and Google last week, and in line with Luke Shepard’s proposals for an OpenID popup).
Although Facebook has not announced any plans for implementing OpenID specificly, their commitment to help improve the user experience suggests to me that it’s only a matter of time before all of the major social networks, in some way, support OpenID. If there were any lingering doubts about the competition between Facebook Connect and OpenID, hopefully the outcome of a successful collaboration will put them to rest.
Factory Joe 