Facebook's Transition To An Open Identity Platform

While many developers believe that opening up access to user emails may corrupt the Facebook Platform ecosystem, the company appears to be moving forward with the transition. Dan Peguine of HonestyBox forwarded us a screenshot last week of a prompt which asks the user to offer their email to the application developer (pictured below). While this is most likely an initial test, it’s clear that Facebook will soon grant developers access to user emails. If things stay on schedule, this could be the largest implementation of an OpenID-like authentication system ever.

For those readers who are unaware of what OpenID is, it’s essentially an authentication protocol which results in the end user only having to remember one login for any site they register for.