Facebook Reinvents the Wheel
At the annual Facebook developers conference (they even have one?), it was announced that Facebook would add support for an OpenID-like service, called Connect, that would allow Facebook users to use their logins to login to websites such as Digg and Six Apart. The key phrase here is OpenID-like. This is not OpenID, nor will it likely work with it. Rather, it is a proprietary system that a small group of websites are using to share logins with eachother.
A few years ago, before OpenID was anything more that a project at Six Apart, I would have applauded these websites for putting forth the effort to share logins amongst each other. These days, however, we have OpenID, which is seeing greater adoption as time goes on. Big names are already on board with OpenID: Yahoo, MySpace (intentionally unlinked), AOL (includes AIM), Six Apart, Wordpress, and Blogger, to name a few. VeriSign and MyOpenID are some of the many entities that are OpenID providers only, and add to the usefulness of the ecosystem.
Facebook and the other parties that are part of Connect are hurting the OpenID community by starting up their own, incompatible identification sharing service. There is no cost to OpenID other than the time to get it set up to work with your infrastructure. So, why are they creating their own service? Even stranger is the fact that Six Apart, the creators of OpenID, are one of the parties that is working with Facebook on this new protocol. Why is Six Apart undermining their own child? It will be interesting to see this play out.
EDIT: Just ran across another article about Connect. I guess Connect is more than just an identity provider. Still, I do not like the fact that Facebook traps all of their data inside their walls.