At F8 today, Facebook rolled out their Facebook Connect platform. With a small amount of code, other sites can integrate the Facebook identity system into their site. The keynote reminded me of early days of Microsoft as they rallied developers to build on their platform by explaining how the platform can help them and being inclusive. They even seemed humble as they talked about what they have done wrong in the past and then reaching out to developers asking for their feedback. They even have a fund and a competition for best applications.

Facebook Connect is a powerful identity system. Using Facebook Connect, a site gets access to the user’s profile data and the users friends. For sites such as Digg and Movable Type that want to make users accountable for their activity, there is an implicit reputation of the user based on the depth of the profile. It is much more difficult for a spammer to build a Facebook identity to spam these participatory sites. Facebook is all about real identity rather then a fake persona. Facebook even has rich privacy controls so that users feel in control of who sees what.

The promise of OpenID was to make login simple and move profile data. A number of us have been looking at using OpenID to make an accountable web. Given the momentum and immediate value of a Facebook identity system and the lack of OpenID RP deployment, one wonders if the identity opportunities of OpenID have passed.

The announcement from MySpace supporting OpenID may enable a more open identity system to evolve, but Facebook has a compelling offering that provides significant value to sites — well, as soon as Facebook Connect is launched anyway.