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Next Steps in Openness

Published by Mike Schroepfer

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 joining the board. It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web. As a next step in that effort, we will be hosting an OpenID Design Summit next week here at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto.

We opened Facebook Platform with a belief that community innovation can add value to users that we can't build on our own. The core set of services and APIs we've introduced have allowed a thriving ecosystem to emerge. In our view, the success of the Platform community is a result of the strength of the products we produce, the opportunities provided to developers, and the value they deliver to users.

We see great opportunities to increase our contributions across the open stack, and to continue our work with the open source community to evolve existing projects like memcached and new technologies like Thrift, which is now being used by companies such as Powerset, iMeem, Rapleaf, Amie Street, last.fm and reCAPTCHA. The future of an open and social Web will be measured not by protocols, but by how much we collectively improve the standards and technologies that enable us and others to give people more powerful ways to share and connect.