Facebook users can now log in to the website using their Gmail accounts, the company announced Monday.

The social network has become an OpenID relying party, following through on a promise it made at a developer event last month. Starting Monday afternoon, Facebook will support login credentials supplied by any OpenID provider that supports “automatic login.”

So, for example, if you’re already logged in to Gmail when you visit Facebook.com, you’ll be given the option to automatically log in to your Facebook account with one click.

Accounts for Google services, like Gmail, as well as providers like OpenID.net, can be used to sign in to Facebook. MySpace, Yahoo and AOL credentials cannot be used, as those companies currently don’t support the automatic login method Facebook is implementing.

Regular Facebook users now have a more secure way of logging in to the site (one less username and password to remember), but the bigger win is what this change will mean for new user adoption.

For Gmail users, the process of “finding friends” is effectively over.

When a new user logs in to Facebook using their Gmail address, the system is able to kick start the networking experience for them. You have a tremendous amount of friend data stored in your Gmail account in the form of your friends’ names and e-mail addresses.

When you authenticate, Google tells you what data Facebook is requesting. See the screenshot above and you’ll see “Google Contacts” on the list. So, after you authenticate, Facebook gains the permission it needs to tap into that list of contacts, find out which of your friends are using Facebook and suggest that you connect with them.

In a statement on the Facebook developer blog, engineer Luke Shepard says:

In tests we’ve run, we’ve noticed that first-time users who register on the site with OpenID are more likely to become active Facebook users. They get up and running after registering even faster than before, find their friends easily, and quickly engage on the site.

It may seem odd that Facebook is being so forward thinking about supporting a portable data standard like OpenID, especially given the company’s history of clamping down on sharing users’ activity data outside of its network in the name of privacy. But this is the kind of data sharing that works in Facebook’s advantage — it eases adoption, simplifies the process of building networks, and increases activity on Facebook.

Furthermore, Facebook has been forward-thinking about ID in general, both with the launch of Facebook Connect and its involvement in the OpenID Foundation. The company’s dedication to making authentication as simple as possible is evidenced by its requirement that an OpenID provider must support “automatic login” — Facebook wants the login experience to meet a very high standard of usability, and only providers who support immediate authentication will be able to play along.

Hopefully, Facebook’s high expectations are a driving force within the industry, and that Monday’s move pushes other OpenID providers to improve their implementations of the emerging standard.

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The Facebook stream is now wide open for developers.

The social networking site has launched its new Facebook Open Stream API, a set of tools developers can use to build apps that let users read, interact with and write to their Facebook stream. The company announced the arrival of the new API, which uses the emerging Activity Streams standard, in a blog post Monday morning.

Update: Also on Monday, the company announced it will soon offer support for OpenID logins.

The Facebook “stream” is the constantly updating river of news that displays what’s going on with you, your friends and whatever tidbits they’re talking about or sharing. Facebook defines the stream as the “the core Facebook product experience.” That’s definitely been the case since last month, when the site changed its default page design to bring the stream front and center.

The Open Stream API gives developers access to that flood of real-time information, and not just to re-publish it elsewhere, but to publish to it and interact with it by leaving comments. Soon, we’ll see specially-built third-party apps for interacting with Facebook, much like FriendFeed and similar sites allow for other social networking services. These apps will be able to let users filter content to see only specific types of posts, comment on items and mark items as favorites. These apps will be able to access Facebook from the desktop, through the browser and via mobile devices.

The new API represents a significant step towards open data sharing on the web. Facebook was one of the great walled gardens — a massive social network of around 200 million active users that was closed off from the rest of the social web. Recently, however, the company has taken steps towards supporting social web standards like OpenID and opening user profiles to public web searches. With Monday’s development, a large chunk of Facebook data becomes as portable as the user chooses to allow it to be — a change we’ve been arguing in favor of for a long while.

It’s a huge win for the open web, and to see why, it’s helpful to study what’s going on behind the scenes.

The Rise of Activity Streams

Facebook’s new API uses the emerging Activity Streams standard. This standard, which MySpace has also taken steps to adopt, proposes a unified model for publishing social networking activities on the web. It standardizes the way sites represent a user’s activity by using an “actor,” “verb,” and “object-type” model: a common way of announcing an event like, “Tom posted a photo” or “Becky left a comment on this video.”

Defining standards for those elements lets any application publish a stream that can be easily read and filtered by other applications. It ensures all the syndicated data coming out of social applications is well-formed so those apps can all play together nicely.

Chris Messina, an advocate of open data standards on the web and one of the authors of Activity Streams sees Monday’s announcement as a possible major development for the social web.

“What I hope it means,” he tells Webmonkey, “is that developers can focus more on creating compelling user experiences that make the most of the richness of activity data from all over the web —- spending less time hard-coding support for individual providers. This should accelerate the rate of innovation, I think, by creating an incentive for publishers to publish activities in a standard format in order to benefit from these kinds of applications.”

Messina also notes that this is just the beginning for the standard.

“I think it’ll start simple, with services that probably look like the old Facebook, or like Friendfeed,” he predicts, “and over time expand to include experiences focused on certain types of activities… giving rise to a whole medley of applications that serve individual needs but that all make use of the same kind of data.”

For an interesting take on what Facebook’s next steps should be, check out Marshall Kirkpatrick’s essay Read/Write Web titled “Despite New Openness, Facebook Remains Fundamentally Closed.” In it, Kirkpatrick argues that only by allowing persistent access to user stream data — a move that would require Facebook to rethink its privacy policies — will this API be as useful as other social tools on the web, such as those offered by Twitter.

See Also:

• Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up
• New Twitter Tools Rival Ease of Facebook Connect
• Facebook Joins the Open Source Party

In a Web 2.0 Expo session on local-targeting, there was a noted lack of discussion over last year’s buzzword, Microformats, and some question as to whether semantic approaches to links and online information are realistic or, worse, dead.

According to Ethan Stack of the shopping site Zvents, microformats aren’t useful unless consumers are willing to lend that data to sites, and they won’t be without some sort of incentive.

“Major retailers don’t use microformats. Microformats represent the hope of Web 2.0 for structured data” said Stack to the agreement of four others on the panel. “[Retailers] would only do it if there’s commercial intent.”

Later, from another panel, Microformats evangelist and Plaxo platform architect Joseph Smarr disagreed. “It’s sort of a chicken and the egg problem between producers and consumers. There have been more consumers lately. Plaxo, Google and Yahoo use microformats. Twitter, for example, has implemented microformats recently. I remain optimistic.”

“Twitter is a good example of why microformats are failing,” Stack rebutted. “Users are lazy and rely on shorthand. Twitter users use ‘#’ marks and ‘@’ signs. They’re not going to use microformats unless there is some large machine processing in the background [doing it for them].”

Microformats, a buzz word often coupled with Web 2.0, represent adding relational data to your online information. For example, tagging your e-mail address or phone number identifies that information for third-parties, making that data more valuable. Likewise, tagging links to friends make those links more valuable in identifying the target as one of your contacts rather than an arbitrary link.

Google and other search engines are examples of producers paving the way for microformats. Search engines have a vested interest in making semantic and relational data available in order to better understand links programmatically. Google can use these tagged links as signals in determining link quality for ranking purposes. Search engine optimizers at the conference have mentioned using microformats has actually increased their rank in Google listings.

See Also:

• Tutorial: Get Acquainted with Microformats
• What Happened to the Microformats Support in Firefox 3
• Google Maps Takes One Giant Leap For Microformats

Google’s App Engine recently revealed a new pricing structure for those wanting to rent computing power from Google beyond its free quota. The pricing structure is in response to those applications that scaled beyond that of the free quota, often shutting down service once the quotas were hit.The downside to the announcement is the quotas for using the service for free are being reduced on February 24th to make way for the more pricey options.According to Google’s announcement, the pricing plan beyond the free quotas are:

• $0.10 per CPU core hour. This covers the actual CPU time an application uses to process a given request, as well as the CPU used for any Datastore usage.
• $0.10 per GB bandwidth incoming, $0.12 per GB bandwidth outgoing. This covers traffic directly to/from users, traffic between the app and any external servers accessed using the URLFetch API, and data sent via the Email API.
• $0.15 per GB of data stored by the application per month.
• $0.0001 per email recipient for emails sent by the application

Ultimately, the pricing structure to use App Engine is competitive with Amazon’s EC2. Google’s only leg up is the free quotas practical for young sites or those just starting.After February 24th, the new free quotas will be 6.5 hours of CPU time and 1 Gigabyte of data transfer per day. That’s down from 46 hours and 10 gigabytes in and 10 gigabytes out per day. The full list of quotas is available from the App Engine siteGoogle App Engine is a way for developers to rent out computing resources from Google. Relying on Google’s systems bypasses the need for doing it yourself by renting from expensive data centers and also relying on Google to take care of reliability and uptime. Google is more or less known for being able to handle scalability well, so in many ways App Engine allows developers to spend more time developing, and less time babysitting web servers.See Also:

• Google Announces App Engine Pricing and New APIs
• New Project Plots to Bring Perl to Google App Engine
• Google’s Open Source Protocol Buffers Offer Scalability, Speed

Facebook officially put its hand in OpenID’s ring by joining its board, according to an announcement by Facebook’s own Mike Schroepfer. Facebook’s inclusion means the company will have a hand in designing the future of the open standard which promises to put internet users’ identity and personal information in their own control while also making it universally accessible.

The movement is slightly surprising considering its own answer to OpenID, dubbed Facebook Connect, is considered by many to be the model competing technologies should adopt. Other notable competing technologies include Google’s Friend Connect and Microsoft’s Passport.

While surprising as a competitive strategy, Facebook’s representatives were particularly enthusiastic in OpenID User Experience summits in October. Also included in the summit were MySpace, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft — many of whom have already adopted OpenID technology in some way.

Facebook’s involvement and Thursday’s announcement is vague as to what the company intends to do with Facebook connect and OpenID, and in particular whether the two technologies will be compatible in the future.

However, it is clear that Facebook wants to show its support and lend a hand to the widely growing open standard. According to Schroepfer:

The future of an open and social Web will be measured not by protocols, but by how much we collectively improve the standards and technologies that enable us and others to give people more powerful ways to share and connect.

This should prove to be the boost OpenID needs to spur further development. With increasing enhancements by Google and Facebook, it could have been easy to forget OpenID. However, now with Facebook officially on board, it seems the big league companies won’t let that happen — a move uncharacteristic for two companies who should be battling for user data. In the end, this is a win for users with privacy concerns who want the ability to control this data themselves by making the data and the technology behind it portable and controllable under open source licenses.

More on Facebook’s announcement over at Wired’s Epicenter blog.

See Also:

• OpenID is Here. Too Bad Users Can’t Figure Out How it Works
• Facebook F8 Conference Leaves Developers Wanting More
• OpenID Q&A: Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr and John McCrea