OpenID and Facebook Connect: actually, does there need to be a winner?

Website owners have been watching the battle between the open standards based OpenID and proprietary Facebook Connect for over a year now, waiting for a winner. But I'm now wondering, does there NEED to be a winner?

My last post on data portability drew some interesting comments. Not only were specific implementations of OpenID defended by Kevin Marks at Google -- and I concede that there are some that are much easier to use than others, whilst providing pretty rich functionality -- but I got some interesting direct contacts.

Like many, we've been holding off implementing either OpenID or Facebook Connect until we see which solution people (site owners and visitors) are favouring; and until they also get a bit easier to implement and use. It seems I needn't have done so, however, because I got an e-mail from the guys at JanRain of Portland, Oregon, who have a solution that enables you to log in to either through a single and smart looking interface.

Their website describes well how RPX works but, in essence, they provide a hosted solution for authenticating your site users using OpenID or Facebook Connect, giving you some simple code to add to your site where your login form goes today. With just a few clicks, visitors to your site can sign up using the identity from a number of sites (Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Google Mail, AOL to name a few), or continue to register using your existing sign up process. If they come in using identity from another site, they can also bring over existing contacts from many of these and, in some instances, post back comments to the other social network. Everything that Facebook Connect can do; and pretty much all that was demo'ed by Google and Plaxo recently.

If there are other solutions that enable you to do so much so easily, I haven't yet found them. It's possible that either Google's solutions in this space or Facebook Connect will get this good in time, but who wants to sit and wait when the user benefits are there to enjoy now? And sites that HAVE taken the leap report a significant increase is user registrations.

We've yet to try JanRain RPX on our site, but I can certainly recommend it is worth a look by anyone who has also been watching the Google/Facebook battle.

It seems you can have both and that the winners can be you and your site visitors!

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz