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Breaking down the walled garden: Some thoughts on Facebook embracing OpenID and opening up status update APIs

Facebook made two interesting announcements this week in the area of making their platform more open. The first announcement was made by Mike Shroepfer in the developer blog post Next Steps in Openness where he writes

Enabling social information to flow through the Web is one of the core goals of Facebook. In the two months since Facebook Connect became generally available, over 4,000 sites and desktop applications have gone live with the service. Users can now log into sites across the Web using their Facebook account, bring their identity and friends with them, and share information and experiences using the same features as they would with applications on Facebook.

As we’ve launched and built Facebook Connect, we’ve been participants in OpenID efforts. One of our user experience experts, Julie Zhuo, presented at the UX Summit in October. Several of our engineers have been participating in meetups, and one of them ran as a community member for a board seat. We’re happy to announce today that we are formalizing our support of the OpenID Foundation by officially download sci-fi movie joining the board.

At first glance it seems contradictory for Facebook to join the OpenID foundation given that many people view Facebook Connect to be a competitor to OpenID as a single sign-on solution albeit a centralized one. The confusion from pundits around this announcement from Facebook is summarized in the Ars Technica article Facebook’s “next steps in openness” raises questions which openly questions why the company needs to join the OpenID foundation when Facebook Connect seems to be enjoying broader deployment across the Web.

The reason seems quite straightforward to me. Right now, Facebook has created a situation where web sites that want to enable their users log-in with credentials from third party sites need to implement two solutions; an OpenID consumer and Facebook Connect. This places a burden on web sites which now either have to chose to adopt one solution over the other or create a user experience problem by offering users both options. It’s bad enough that there is now a market for companies who wrap both solutions in a single package like JanRain and Clickpass. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook has been getting an earful from some of their larger Facebook Connect partners about being a competing offering to OpenID.

That said, I doubt that a generic solution like OpenID will ever beat the ease of use and value added functionality that Facebook has created with Facebook Connect. By supporting OpenID, Facebook gets to silence the sites who simply want single sign-on solution that is built on standards so they can implement one solution to get access to users of Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, MySpace, and AOL’s services among others. However anyone who wants the richer integration that comes with integrating with the Facebook mini-feed and live feed will still need to adopt the proprietary Facebook Connect.

The second interesting announcement about Facebook opening up comes from Chris Putnam in the post titled Opening Up Facebook Status, Notes, Links, and Video to Facebook Platform which is excerpted below

We’ve seen increasing engagement with over 15 million users updating their status each day and sharing over 24 million links per month. We wanted to make sure this content and the ability to share this content was available through our standard APIs.

Specifically, your applications can now directly access all of a user’s status, links, and notes via new methods and FQL calls. Your application will have access to any status, notes, or links from the active user or their friends that are c