social networking | Simone Baldassarri

Facebook has joined the board of OpenID, the open user-authentication system also used by MySpace, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and IBM.

“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,” Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s director of engineering, wrote in a blog post.

Facebook Connect lets users put their profile information on various Web sites across the Internet, register and sign in to the third-party sites using their Facebook login, access their friend lists, and share their current browsing activities on the connected sites with chosen friends.

Luke Shepard, a member of Facebook’s Platform and Connect teams, will join the eight-member OpenID board.

“Given the popularity and positive user experience of Facebook Connect, we look forward to Facebook working within the community to improve OpenID’s usability and reach,” board members David Recordon of SixApart and Chris Messina of Vidoop, wrote in a blog post.

Facebook initially deployed a proprietary log-in system for Connect while MySpace and Google used OpenID for their rival MySpaceID and Google Friend Connect services.

Since the December launch of Facebook Connect, it has been deployed on more than 4,000 Web sites and desktop applications, Schroepfer wrote.

The social networking site will host an OpenID Design Summit next week at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, he said.

“The summit will convene some of the top designers from Facebook, the DiSo Project, Google, JanRain, MySpace, Six Apart and Yahoo, focusing on how existing OpenID implementations could support an experience similar to Facebook Connect,” Recordon and Messina wrote.

“The core set of services and APIs we’ve introduced have allowed a thriving ecosystem to emerge,” Schroepfer continued. “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.”

Yahoo joined OpenID in January 2008, and Microsoft, IBM, Google, and VeriSign followed suit a month later. MySpace issued its support in July 2008.

Andrew Nash, senior director of information risk management at PayPal, also joined the board in late January 2009.

Corporate or enterprise, Social Networking (CSN) technology is changing the way relationships are formed and strengthened in business environments, and, therefore, is changing the way business is conducted. In the past, employees built relationships by working in close proximity or sharing information over the proverbial water cooler. As organizational structures evolve, disperse, and separate geographically, individuals have begun to initiate, extend, and manage their network of professional relationships through social, Web 2.0 technologies.

Online social networking within the enterprise increases the density of connections among individuals to drive business value. A Corporate Social Network is a collection of social networks, among which affinity groups of employees and other constituents learn about each other and interact through their own, individual profiles. Employees and other constituents may be members of multiple networks within the Corporate Social Network, requiring that their profiles be portable and able to collect and amalgamate information from that individual’s interactions and knowledge sharing among all of the corporate networks to which he or she has access. These networks are secure and private, open only to those constituencies identified by the enterprise, and they provide role-based access to people and information which are controlled by the enterprise, as well as varying levels of privileges for network administrators.

The connections fostered through Corporate or Enterprise Social Networks are anchored in affinity and beneficial to individual members through the people and information they are able to find, creating connections and knowledge capital that become attached to their profile and visible to other network members. Corporate Social Networks are used primarily to build trust and share knowledge on a peer-to-peer basis, as opposed to through documents that are subject to information obsolescence. Network members share knowledge in real-time, in effect creating a living knowledge map within the enterprise network. Today’s corporate environment is unique and dynamic; organizations are globally dispersed, high value is placed on knowledge, and requirements for innovation are ever growing. Companies that thrive in this environment are finding ways to connect their people through Corporate Social Networking.