Facebook isn't normally a company you'd associate with "identity management," but they announced Facebook Connect yesterday, and it bears watching if you're even close to thinking about how internet-scale identity comes to interact with your enterprise architecture.
Dick Hard of Sxip Identity has posted a blog entry asking if FB Connect is a "fatal blow" for OpenID:
"Facebook Connect is a powerful identity system. Using Facebook Connect, a site gets access to the user’s profile data and the users friends. For sites such as Digg and Movable Type that want to make users accountable for their activity, there is an implicit reputation of the user based on the depth of the profile. It is much more difficult for a spammer to build a Facebook identity to spam these participatory sites. Facebook is all about real identity rather then a fake persona. Facebook even has rich privacy controls so that users feel in control of who sees what.
The promise of OpenID was to make login simple and move profile data. A number of us have been looking at using OpenID to make an accountable web. Given the momentum and immediate value of a Facebook identity system and the lack of OpenID RP deployment, one wonders if the identity opportunities of OpenID have passed."
And David Recordon fires back, saying that FB Connect actually helps OpenID:
"Dick Hardt asks the question on his blog if Facebook Connect is a fatal blow to OpenID. I actually think that it helps to show why OpenID is going to become so valuable as you start to invest in your profile(s). To me, it shows that we're now all able to tell the same story and explain to normal people the value of having an identity and profile that can move about them around the web.
Just as no one would let Microsoft own the protocol, no one is going to let Facebook either."
Interesting stuff -- and a topic that's sure to garner plenty of attention as we move toward this year's Digital ID World conference. Be sure to keep an eye on this one.
