Facebook announced this afternoon that it’s joining the OpenID Foundation – an interesting move considering that Facebook Connect, the company’s identity platform for third-party websites, has so far looked like more of a competitor to OpenID than an ally.

In a blog post, Facebook writes “We’re happy to announce today that we are formalizing our support of the OpenID Foundation by officially joining the boardIt 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.” However, the company stops short of announcing plans to either become an identity provider for OpenID, or, allowing people to use OpenID to login to Facebook.

What this move seems to be about, at least in the way that Facebook and the OpenID Foundation are spinning things, is improving the user experience of OpenID In another blog post, Chris Messina, who is involved with the OpenID Foundation, writes, ”Although Facebook has not announced any plans for implementing OpenID specificly, their commitment to help improve the user experience suggests to me that it’s only a matter of time before all of the major social networks, in some way, support OpenID.

If there were any lingering doubts about the competition between Facebook Connect and OpenID, hopefully the outcome of a success collaboration will put them to rest.” To be honest, I still have doubts.

The Facebook Connect experience is simply better than that offered by OpenID, and from a competitive standpoint, Facebook has an opportunity to be the standard identity provider for other websites While goodwill can created by joining the OpenID Foundation and sharing what the industry likes to call “best practices,” at this point, Facebook actually implementing OpenID would be a far bigger boon to OpenID than it would be to Facebook, and hence, I don’t see it happening any time soon.

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