Today we're excited to join Facebook's Mike Schroepfer in announcing that they have joined the OpenID Foundation's board as a sustaining corporate member. Luke Shepard, a key member of Facebook's Platform and Connect teams and a huge internal advocate for OpenID, has been selected as their representative and joins the current board of seven community elected board members and six sustaining corporate members: Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal (joined last week), VeriSign and Yahoo!. Additionally, to maintain the ratio of community and corporate board members, Joseph Smarr will be joining the board as our eighth community member. As the OpenID community entered 2009 two key topics have become the focal points on the road to mainstream adoption: user experience and security. Given the popularity and positive user experience of Facebook Connect, we look forward to Facebook working within the community to improve OpenID's usability and reach. As a first step, Facebook will be hosting a design summit next week at their campus in Palo Alto which follows a similar summit on user experience hosted at Yahoo! last year. The summit will convene some of the top designers from Facebook, the DiSo Project, Google, JanRain, MySpace, Six Apart and Yahoo!, focusing on how existing OpenID implementations could support an experience similar to Facebook Connect. Facebook's financial contribution along with its membership on the board signals the company's enthusiasm to work more closely with the OpenID community, building up momentum towards their adoption of OpenID as a standard. Facebook furthering its commitment to openness couldn't have come at a better time to make 2009 an amazing year for OpenID and the wider social web. For press contacts, please call OpenID Foundation board members David Recordon at 503.341.3009 or Chris Messina at 412.225.1051.