Facebook continues to steamrolelr it’s way to becoming the defacto OS of the social web. With their new launch of applications, facebook is finally opening the door to federate all of our social identities under their umbrella. And it lets us developers build all manner of new social applications – without having to bother with recreating the fundamental plumbing of buddy lists, commenting and messaging etc. – and – (most importantly) lets any 3rd party social app leverage Facebook’s massively growing install base.
But is this how we wanted it to happen?
Walkah has a great post up today [Facebook apps and the importance of Identity 2.0] looking at the issues this creates
The problem here is that we, the users, don’t own our identity on the internet. There are walled gardens and data silos of information about us. Twitter and Facebook both have directory entries – a username and a password – that they use to identify me but there is no correlation that the directory entries match. I can’t verify that they do without giving one system full access to the other to verify that the username on each system actually correspond to the same person. This is where we need user-centric identity. This is “why OpenID”.
James will be leading a workshop on OpenID during the ‘camp’ portion of our E20 event on Tuesday
. Looking forward to the discussion.
