An admittedly-rumor-based-but-still-thought-provoking post from John McCrea:
…a source who-shall-go-un-named shared with me that Facebook has just quietly launched a “single sign on” initiative designed to put them in position of de facto cross-site identity monopolist.
I’ve been saying for awhile that MySpace could get-back to relevancy if they became an OpenID provider. Not much of a surprise that Facebook would be working on the same thing (they’re smart) … and not much of a surprise that they would take a proprietary approach (worked pretty well so far) …
The only prediction I want to make is that the name for their single-sign-on service will notbe something the tech community currently uses (’single-sign-on’ and anything with ‘identity’ are out). Facebook changed ’social network’ to ’social graph,’ ‘blogs’ to ‘Notes’, a ‘website’ to ‘Pages’ … maybe they’ll just call it ‘Sign On’? Or just ‘Login’? Place your bets.
And on the you-own-your-identity-data-side, there’s also lots of action …