I'm so excited by last week's announcement from Facebook that they will soon accept OpenID.
For those of you unfamiliar with OpenID, it is, essentially an open-source single sign on for the Web. It allows you, the user, to have one name and one password that works across many sites, as long as those sites accept OpenID.
Obviously, for OpenID to be significant, many sites need to accept it. To date, more than 30,000 do just that, including highly trafficked sites such as Yahoo!.
So Facebook accepting OpenID is a very big deal. In fact, I'd suggest that Facebook will be to OpenID what Oprah was to Twitter, for a number of reasons:
1. Facebook will take OpenID mainstream
Facebook, more than any other site out there to date, has achieved acceptability among the mainstream U.S. population. With more than 200 million members ranging from your boss to your nanny to every one of your former college classmates, Facebook is present everywhere, which means that OpenID could be too.
2. Facebook users pay attention
Facebook, like it or not, has a user base that pays attention to changes in both interface and policy. Hopefully they will notice this change and embrace it.
3. People sign into Facebook more often than they brush their teeth
What's the saying ... it takes 20 days of daily use to form a new habit, or something like that? Facebook's users visit daily, which means that they may become accustomed to signing in via OpenID, which will mean their propensity to use it will increase (as well as other sites' willingness to consider it).
Once OpenID becomes accepted by the Internet population, as well as the majority of substantial websites requiring sign-in, we are well on our way to a single sign-on for the entire Interweb.
What would that look like? I'm not completely sure, but I do know that it is a building block to the next iteration of wherever it is we are going.
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