Archive for May, 2009

Successfully accessed Facebook with OpenID

Saturday, May 23rd, 2009

I have successfully accessed Facebook with my OpenID. I learned that Facebook was acting as an OpenID relying party, meaning Facebook will accept some other credentials than ones provided by Facebook to access your Facebook account. I discovered this capability when reading the post OpenID’s Tipping Point. It was very easy to set up. Here are the steps I went through in Facebook to link an account via OpenID:

Settings -> Linked Accounts -> Add a new linked account: -> OpenID…

I then entered my OpenID URL and clicked “Link New Account”.

Using OpenID to access Facebook is a little bit different than other apps that I have used to authenticate with OpenID. To use OpenID to authenticate to Facebook, you actually authenticate with your OpenID provider first before accessing Facebook. Then when you access Facebook, it recognizes the existing OpenID authenticated session and proceeds to take you to your Facebook “Home”.

This is a great enhancement to Facebook. It makes it much more convenient for me to access the application.