Facebook joins OpenID Foundation Board

It's important to note that Microsoft is a member of the W3C. Being a member of an organization doesn't mean you are going to use or enhance any of the organization's technologies.<p>It will be good if people can start logging on to "real" sites with an OpenID. But I have a feeling Facebook only wants OpenID so that people can use their facebook password to log on "everywhere". This is how Google "supports" OpenID also.

Great- this means that everyone needs to start taking OpenID seriously. I'm not sure what incentive there is for Facebook to join the OpenSocial movement since, given enough time, Facebook Connect could easily become the standard open login protocol. If Facebook's goal is to integrate OpenSocial into Facebook then they could have skipped a huge headache for themselves and developers (in the form of a herky-jerky start) by simply going with OpenSoc from the beginning.

Looks like 2009 is going to be (open) identity year? If only the big ones started to accept third party openid to login to their services...