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.